THE YANKEE COMANDANTE

A REPORTER AT LARGE 

THE YANKEE 

COMANDANTE 

A story of love, revolution, and betrayal. 

BY DAVID GRANN 

COURTESY RAMIRO LORENZO 

William Alexander Morgan being applauded by Fidel Castro, in Havana in 1959. Morgan said that he had joined the Cuban Revolution

ecause “the most important thing for free men to do is to protect the freedom of others.” 

For a moment, he was obscured by the 

Havana night. It was as if he were invisible, 

as he had been before coming to 

Cuba, in the midst of revolution. Then a 

burst of floodlights illuminated him: 

William Alexander Morgan, the great 

Yankee comandante. He was standing, 

with his back against a bullet-pocked 

wall, in an empty moat surrounding La 

Cabaña—an eighteenth-century stone 

fortress, on a cliff overlooking Havana 

Harbor, that had been converted into a 

prison. Flecks of blood were drying on 

the patch of ground where Morgan’s 

friend had been shot, moments earlier. 

Morgan, who was thirty-two, blinked 

into the lights. He faced a firing squad. 

The gunmen gazed at the man they 

had been ordered to kill. Morgan was 

nearly six feet tall, and had the powerful 

arms and legs of someone who had survived 

in the wild. With a stark jaw, a pugnacious 

nose, and scruffy blond hair, he 

had the gallant look of an adventurer in a 

movie serial, of a throwback to an earlier 

age, and photographs of him had appeared 

in newspapers and magazines 

around the world. The most alluring images—taken 

when he was fighting in the 

mountains, with Fidel Castro and Che 

Guevara—showed Morgan, with an untamed 

beard, holding a Thompson submachine 

gun. Though he was now 

shaved and wearing prison garb, the executioners 

recognized him as the mysterious 

Americano who once had been hailed 

as a hero of the revolution. 

It was March 11, 1961, two years after 

Morgan had helped to overthrow the dictator 

Fulgencio Batista, bringing Castro 

to power. The revolution had since fractured, 

its leaders devouring their own, like 

Saturn, but the sight of Morgan before a 

firing squad was a shock. In 1957, when 

Castro was still widely seen as fighting for 

democracy, Morgan had travelled from 

Florida to Cuba and headed into the jungle, 

joining a guerrilla force. In the words 

of one observer, Morgan was “like Holden 

Caulfield with a machine gun.” He was 

the only American in the rebel army and 

the sole foreigner, other than Guevara, an 

Argentine, to rise to the army’s highest 

rank, comandante. 

After the revolution, Morgan’s role in 

Cuba aroused even greater fascination, as 

the island became enmeshed in the larger 

battle of the Cold War. An American 

who knew Morgan said that he had 

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 28, 2012 47

served as Castro’s “chief cloak-and-dagger 

man,” and Time called him Castro’s 

“crafty, U.S.-born double agent.” 

Now Morgan was charged with conspiring 

to overthrow Castro. The Cuban 

government claimed that Morgan had 

actually been working for U.S. intelligence—that 

he was, in effect, a triple 

agent. Morgan denied the allegations, 

but even some of his friends wondered 

who he really was, and why he had come 

to Cuba. 

Before Morgan was led outside La 

Cabaña, an inmate asked him if there was 

anything he could do for him. Morgan 

replied, “If you ever get out of here alive, 

which I doubt you will, try to tell people 

my story.” Morgan grasped that more 

than his life was at stake: the Cuban regime 

would distort his role in the revolution, 

if not excise it from the public record, 

and the U.S. government would 

stash documents about him in classified 

files, or “sanitize” them by concealing 

passages with black ink. He would be 

rubbed out—first from the present, then 

from the past. 

The head of the firing squad shouted, 

“Attention!” The gunmen raised their 

Belgian rifles. Morgan feared for his wife, 

Olga—whom he had met in the mountains—and 

for their two young daughters. 

He had always managed to bend the 

“Wider.” 

• • 

forces of history, and he had made a lastminute 

plea to communicate with Castro. 

Morgan had believed that the man he 

once called his “faithful friend” would 

never kill him. But now the executioners 

were cocking their guns. 

THE FIRST TRICK 

When Morgan arrived in Havana, in 

December, 1957, he was propelled 

by the thrill of a secret. He made 

sure that he wasn’t being followed as he 

moved surreptitiously through the neonlit 

capital. Advertised as the “Playland of 

the Americas,” Havana offered one 

temptation after another: the Sans Souci 

night club, where, on outdoor stages, 

dancers with frank hips swayed under the 

stars to the cha-cha; the Hotel Capri, 

whose slot machines spat out American 

silver dollars; and the Tropicana, where 

guests such as Elizabeth Taylor and 

Marlon Brando enjoyed lavish revues 

featuring the Diosas de Carne, or “flesh 

goddesses.” 

Morgan, then a pudgy twenty-nineyear-old, 

tried to appear as just another 

man of leisure. He wore a two-hundredand-fifty-dollar 

white suit with a white 

shirt, and a new pair of shoes. “I looked 

like a real fat-cat tourist,” he later joked. 

But, according to members of Morgan’s 

inner circle, and to the unpublished 

account of a close friend, he avoided the 

glare of the city’s night life, making his 

way along a street in Old Havana, near a 

wharf that offered a view of La Cabaña, 

with its drawbridge and moss-covered 

walls. Morgan paused by a telephone 

booth, where he encountered a Cuban 

contact named Roger Rodríguez. A 

raven-haired student radical with a thick 

mustache, Rodríguez had once been shot 

by police during a political demonstration, 

and he was a member of a revolutionary 

cell. 

Most tourists remained oblivious of 

the many iniquities of Cuba, where people 

often lived without electricity or running 

water. Graham Greene, who published 

“Our Man in Havana” in 1958, 

later recalled, “I enjoyed the louche atmosphere 

of Batista’s city and I never stayed 

long enough to become aware of the sad 

political background of arbitrary imprisonment 

and torture.” Morgan, however, 

had briefed himself on Batista, who had 

seized power in a coup, in 1952: how the 

dictator liked sitting in his palace, eating 

sumptuous meals and watching horror 

films, and how he tortured and killed dissidents, 

whose bodies were sometimes 

dumped in fields, with their eyes gouged 

out or their crushed testicles stuffed in 

their mouths. 

Morgan and Rodríguez resumed 

walking through Old Havana, and began 

a furtive conversation. Morgan was rarely 

without a cigarette, and typically communicated 

through a haze of smoke. He 

didn’t know Spanish, but Rodríguez 

spoke broken English. They had previously 

met in Miami, becoming friends, 

and Morgan believed that he could trust 

him. Morgan confided that he planned to 

sneak into the Sierra Maestra, a mountain 

range on Cuba’s remote southeastern 

coast, where revolutionaries had taken up 

arms against the regime. He intended to 

enlist with the rebels, who were commanded 

by Fidel Castro. 

The name of Batista’s mortal enemy 

carried the jolt of the forbidden. On November 

25, 1956, Castro, a thirty-yearold 

lawyer and the illegitimate son of a 

prosperous landowner, had launched 

from Mexico an amphibious invasion of 

Cuba, along with eighty-one self-styled 

commandos, including Che Guevara. 

After their battered wooden ship ran 

aground, Castro and his men waded 

48 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 28, 2012

through chest-deep waters, and came 

ashore in a swamp whose tangled vegetation 

tore their skin. Batista’s Army 

soon ambushed them, and Guevara was 

shot in the neck. (He later wrote, “I immediately 

began to wonder what would 

be the best way to die, now that all 

seemed lost.”) Only a dozen or so rebels, 

including the wounded Guevara and 

Castro’s younger brother, Raúl, escaped, 

and, exhausted and delirious with 

thirst—one drank his own urine—they 

fled into the steep jungles of the Sierra 

Maestra. 

Morgan told Rodríguez that he had 

been tracking the progress of the uprising. 

After Batista mistakenly declared 

that Castro had died in the ambush, Castro 

allowed a Times correspondent, Herbert 

Matthews, to be escorted into the Sierra 

Maestra. A close friend of Ernest 

Hemingway, Matthews longed not 

merely to cover world-changing events 

but to make them, and he was captivated 

by the tall rebel leader, with his wild beard 

and burning cigar. “The personality of the 

man is overpowering,” Matthews wrote. 

“Here was an educated, dedicated fanatic, 

a man of ideals, of courage.” Matthews 

concluded that Castro had “strong ideas 

of liberty, democracy, social justice, the 

need to restore the Constitution.” On 

February 24, 1957, the story appeared on 

the paper’s front page, intensifying the rebellion’s 

romantic aura. Matthews later 

put it this way: “A bell tolled in the jungles 

of the Sierra Maestra.” 

Yet why would an American be willing 

to die for Cuba’s revolution? When 

Rodríguez pressed Morgan, he indicated 

that he wanted to be both on the side of 

good and on the edge of danger, but he 

also wanted something else: revenge. 

Morgan said that he had an American 

buddy who had travelled to Havana and 

been killed by Batista’s soldiers. Later, 

Morgan provided more details to others 

in Cuba: his friend, a man named Jack 

Turner, had been caught smuggling 

weapons to the rebels, and was “tortured 

and tossed to the sharks by Batista.” 

Morgan told Rodríguez that he had 

already made contact with another revolutionary, 

who had arranged to sneak him 

into the mountains. Rodríguez was taken 

aback: the supposed rebel was an agent of 

Batista’s secret police. Rodríguez warned 

Morgan that he’d fallen into a trap. 

Rodríguez, fearing for Morgan’s life, 

offered to help him. He could not transport 

Morgan to the Sierra Maestra, but 

he could take him to the camp of a rebel 

group in the Escambray Mountains, 

which cut across the central part of the 

country. These guerrillas were opening a 

new front, and Castro welcomed them to 

the “common struggle.” 

Morgan set out with Rodríguez and a 

driver on the two-hundred-and-seventeen 

mile journey. As Aran Shetterly details 

in his incisive biography “The Americano” 

(2007), the car soon arrived at a 

military roadblock. A soldier peered inside 

at Morgan in his gleaming suit, the 

only outfit that he seemed to own. Morgan 

knew what would happen if he were 

seized—as Guevara said, “in a revolution, 

one wins or dies”—and he had prepared 

a cover story, in which he was an American 

businessman on his way to see coffee 

plantations. After hearing the tale, the 

soldier let them pass, and Morgan and his 

conspirators roared up the road, up into 

the Escambray, where the air became 

cooler and thinner, and where the threethousand-foot 

peaks had an eerie purple 

tint. 

Morgan was taken to a safe house to 

rest, then driven to a mountainside near 

the town of Banao. A peasant shepherded 

Morgan and Rodríguez through 

vines and banana leaves until they reached 

a remote clearing, flanked by steep slopes. 

The peasant made a birdlike sound, 

which rang through the forest and was 

reciprocated by a distant whistle. A sentry 

emerged, and Morgan and Rodríguez 

were led to a campsite strewn with water 

basins and hammocks and a few antiquated 

rifles. Morgan could count only 

thirty or so men, many of whom appeared 

barely out of high school and had the 

emaciated, straggly look of shipwreck 

survivors. 

The rebels regarded Morgan uncertainly. 

Max Lesnik, a Cuban journalist in 

charge of the organization’s propaganda, 

soon met up with the group, and recalls 

wondering if Morgan was “some kind of 

agent from the C.I.A.” 

Since the Spanish-American War, the 

U.S. had often meddled in Cuban affairs, 

treating the island like a colony. President 

Dwight D. Eisenhower had blindly supported 

Batista—believing that he would 

“deal with the Commies,” as he put it to 

Vice-President Richard Nixon—and the 

C.I.A. had activated operatives throughout 

the island. In 1954, in a classified report, 

an American general advised that if 

the U.S. was to survive the Cold War it 

needed to “learn to subvert, sabotage, and 

destroy our enemies by more clever, more 

sophisticated, and more effective methods 

than those used against us.” The 

C.I.A. went so far as to hire a renowned 

magician, John Mulholland, to teach operatives 

sleight of hand and misdirection. 

Mulholland produced two illustrated 

manuals, which referred to covert operations 

as “tricks.” 

As the C.I.A. tried to assess the threat 

to Batista, its operatives attempted to 

penetrate rebel forces in the mountains. 

Among other things, agents were believed 

to have recruited, or posed as, reporters. 

Mulholland advised operatives 

that “even more practice is needed to act 

a lie skillfully than is required to tell one.” 

The rebels also had to be sure that 

Morgan was not a K.G.B. operative, or a 

mercenary working for Batista’s military 

intelligence. In the Sierra Maestra, Castro 

had recently discovered that a peasant 

within his ranks was an Army informant. 

The peasant, after being summoned, 

dropped to his knees, begging that the 

revolution take care of his children. Then 

he was shot in the head. 

Morgan was now brought to see the 

commander of the rebel group, 

Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo. Twenty-three 

years old, soft-spoken, and bone-thin, 

Menoyo had a long, handsome face that 

was shielded by dark spectacles and a 

beard, giving him the look of a fugitive. 

The C.I.A. later noted, in its file on him, 

that he was an intelligent, capable young 

man who would not break “under normal 

interrogating techniques.” 

As a boy, Menoyo had emigrated 

from Spain—a lisp was faintly present 

when he spoke Spanish—and he had inherited 

his family’s militant posture toward 

tyranny. His oldest brother had 

been killed, at the age of sixteen, fighting 


the Fascists during the Spanish Civil 

War. His other brother, who had also 

come to Cuba, had been gunned down 

while leading a doomed assault on Batista’s 

palace, in 1957. Menoyo had identified 

the body at a Havana morgue before 

heading into the mountains. “I wanted 

to continue the fight in my brother’s 

name,” he recalls. 

Through a translator, Morgan told 

Menoyo his story about wanting to 

avenge a buddy’s death. Morgan said that 

he had served in the U.S. Army and was 

skilled in martial arts and hand-to-hand 

combat, and that he could train the inexperienced 

rebels in guerrilla warfare. 

There was more to fighting than shooting 

a rifle, Morgan argued; as he later 

said, with the right tactics they could put 

“the fear of God” in the enemy. To demonstrate 

his prowess, Morgan borrowed 

a knife and flicked it at a tree at least 

twenty yards away. It hit the target so 

squarely that some rebels gasped. 

That evening, they argued over 

whether Morgan could stay. Morgan 

seemed simpático—“like a Cuban,” as 

Lesnik puts it. But many rebels, fearing 

that he was an infiltrator, wanted to send 

Morgan back to Havana. The group’s 

chief of intelligence, Roger Redondo, recalls, 

“We did everything possible to make 

him leave.” During the next several days, 

they marched him endlessly up and down 

the mountainsides. Morgan was so fat, 

one rebel joked, that he had to be C.I.A. 

Morgan, famished and fatigued, repeatedly 

hollered a few Spanish words 

that he had learned, “No soy mulo”—“I’m 

not a mule!” At one point, the rebels led 

him into a patch of prickly poisonous 

shrubs, which stung like wasps and 

caused his chest and face to become 

grievously inflamed. Morgan could no 

longer sleep at night. When he removed 

his sweaty white shirt, Redondo recalls, 

“We pitied him. He was so fair-skinned 

and had turned such an angry red.” 

Morgan’s body also offered clues to a 

violent past. He had burn marks on his 

right arm, and a nearly foot-long scar ran 

across his chest, suggesting that someone 

had slashed him with a knife. There was 

a tiny scar under his chin, another by his 

left eye, and several on his left foot. It was 

as if he had already suffered years of hardship 

in the jungle. 

Morgan endured whatever ordeal the 

rebels subjected him to, shedding thirtyfive 

pounds along the way. He later wrote 

that he had become unrecognizable: “I 

weigh only—165 lbs and have a beard.” 

Redondo says, “The gringo was tough, 

and the armed men of the Escambray 

came to admire his persistence.” 

Several weeks after Morgan arrived, 

a lookout noticed something moving 

amid distant cedars and tropical plants. 

Using binoculars, he made out six men, 

in khaki uniforms and wide-brimmed 

hats, carrying Springfield rifles. A Batista 

Army patrol. 

Most of the rebels had never faced 

combat. Morgan later described them as 

“doctors, lawyers, farmers, chemists, 

boys, students, and old men banded together.” 

The lookout sounded the alarm, 

and Menoyo ordered everyone to take up 

positions around the camp. The rebels 

were not to fire, Menoyo explained, unless 

he said so. Morgan crouched beside 

Menoyo, holding one of the few semiautomatic 

rifles. As the soldiers crept 

closer, a shot rang out. 

It was Morgan. 

Menoyo cursed under his breath as 

both sides began shooting. Bullets split 

trees in half, and a bitter-tasting fog of 

smoke drifted over the mountainside. 

The thunderous sounds of the guns made 

it nearly impossible to communicate. A 

Batista soldier was hit in the shoulder, a 

scarlet stain seeping through his uniform, 

and he tumbled down the mountain like 

a boulder. The commander of the Army 

patrol retrieved the wounded soldier and, 

along with the rest of his men, retreated 

into the wilderness, leaving a trail of 

blood. 

In the sudden quiet, Menoyo turned 

to Morgan and yelled, “Why the hell did 

you fire?” 

Morgan, when he was told in English 

what Menoyo was saying, seemed baffled. 

“I thought you said to shoot when I saw 

their eyes,” he said. No one had translated 

Menoyo’s original command. 

Morgan had made a mistake, but it 

had only hastened an inevitable battle. 

Menoyo told Morgan and the others to 

clear out: hundreds of Batista’s soldiers 

would soon be upon them. 

The men stuffed their belongings into 

backpacks made from sugar sacks. 

Menoyo took with him a medallion that 

his mother had given him, depicting the 

Immaculate Conception. Morgan tucked 

away his own mementos: photographs of 

a young boy and a young girl. The rebels 

divided into two groups, and Morgan set 

out with Menoyo and twenty others, 

marching for more than a hundred miles 

through the mountains. 

They usually moved during the night, 

then, at dawn, found a sheltered spot and 

ate what little food they had, taking turns 

sleeping while sentries kept watch. Morgan, 

who called one of his semi-automatic 

rifles his niño, always kept a weapon 

nearby. As darkness returned, the men 

resumed marching, listening to the

sounds of woodpeckers and barking dogs 

and their own exhausted breathing. Their 

bodies slackened from hunger, and beards 

covered their faces like jungle growth. 

When a nineteen-year-old rebel fell and 

broke his foot, Morgan supported him, 

making sure that he was not left behind. 

One morning during the march, a 

rebel was scrounging for food when he 

spotted about two hundred Batista soldiers 

in a nearby valley. The rebels faced 

annihilation. As panic spread, Morgan 

helped Menoyo devise a plan. They would 

prepare an ambush, hiding behind a series 

of large stones, in a U formation. It was 

critical, Morgan said, to leave an escape 

route. The rebels crouched behind the 

stones, feeling the warmth of the earth 

against their bodies, holding their rifles 

steady against their cheeks. Earlier, some 

of the young men had professed cheerful 

indifference to death, but their brio vanished 

as they confronted the prospect. 

Morgan braced himself for the fight. 

He had inserted himself into a foreign 

conflict, and now everything was at risk. 

His predicament was akin to that of Robert 

Jordan, the American protagonist of 

“For Whom the Bell Tolls,” who, while 

aiding the Republicans in the Spanish 

Civil War, must blow up a bridge: “He 

had only one thing to do and that was 

what he should think about....To worry 

was as bad as to be afraid. It simply made 

things more difficult.” 

Batista’s soldiers approached the ridge. 

Though the rebels could hear branches 

snapping under the soldiers’ boots, 

Menoyo told his men to hold fire, making 

sure that Morgan understood this 

time. Soon, the enemy soldiers were so 

close that Morgan could see the barrels of 

their guns. “Patria o Muerte,” Castro liked 

to say—“Fatherland or Death.” Finally, 

Menoyo gave the signal to shoot. Amid 

the screaming, blood, and chaos, some 

of the rebels fell back, but, as Shetterly 

wrote, “they noticed Morgan out in front 

of everyone, moving ahead, completely 

focused on the fight.” 

Batista’s soldiers started to flee. 

“They folded,” Armando Fleites, a 

medic with the rebels, recalls. “It was a 

complete victory.” 

More than a dozen of Batista’s soldiers 

were wounded or killed. The rebels, who 

took the dead soldiers’ guns, had not lost 

a single man, and afterward they enlisted 

Morgan to teach them better ways to 

“I wish my identity weren’t so wrapped up with who I am.” 

fight. One former rebel recalls, “He 

trained me in guerrilla warfare—how to 

handle different weapons, how to plant 

bombs.” Morgan instructed the men in 

judo and how to breathe underwater 

using a hollow reed. “There were so many 

things that he knew that we didn’t,” the 

rebel says. Morgan even knew some Japanese 

and German. 

He learned Spanish, becoming a full 

member of the group, which was dubbed 

the Second National Front of the Escambray. 

Like the other rebels, Morgan took 

an oath to “fight and defend with my life 

this little piece of free territory,” to “guard 

all the war secrets,” and to “denounce traitors.” 

Morgan rose quickly, first commanding 

half a dozen men, then leading 

a larger column and, finally, presiding 

over several square kilometres of occupied 

territory. 

As Morgan won more battles, the 

news of his curious presence began filtering 

out. A Cuban rebel radio station 

reported that rebels “led by an American” 

had killed forty Batista soldiers. Another 

broadcast hailed a “Yankee fighting for 

the liberty of Cuba.” The Miami newspaper 

Diario Las Américas stated that the 

American had been a “member of the 

‘Rangers’ who landed in Normandy and 

opened the way to the Allied forces by 

destroying the Nazi installations on the 

French coast before D Day.” 

• • 

U.S. and Cuban intelligence agents 

also began picking up chatter about a 

Yankee commando. In the summer of 

1958, the C.I.A. reported whispers of a 

rebel, “identified only as ‘El Americano,’” 

who had played a critical role in “planning 

and carrying out guerrilla activities,” and 

who had virtually wiped out a Batista unit 

while leading his men in an ambush. An 

informant from a Cuban revolutionary 

group told the F.B.I. that El Americano 

was Morgan. Another said that Morgan 

had “risked his life many times” to save 

the rebels, and was considered “quite a 

hero among these forces for bravery and 

daring.” The reports eventually set off a 

scramble among U.S. government agencies—including 

the C.I.A., the Secret 

Service, the State Department, Army intelligence, 

and the F.B.I.—to determine 

who William Alexander Morgan was, 

and whom he was working for. 

THE SECRET DOSSIER 

Edgar Hoover was feeling tremors of 

J. instability. First, there was his heart: 

in 1958, he had suffered a minor attack, 

at the age of sixty-three. The head of the 

F.B.I., Hoover was obsessed with his 

privacy, and kept the incident largely 

to himself, but he began a relentless 

diet-and-exercise regimen, disciplining 

his body with the same force of will that 


had eradicated a childhood stutter. He 

instructed the bureau’s research-andanalysis 

section to inform him of any 

scientific advancement that might extend 

the human life span. 

Compounding Hoover’s unease was 

that “infernal little Cuban republic,” as 

Theodore Roosevelt had described it. 

Hoover warned his agents that the growing 

number of Castro followers in the 

U.S. “may pose a threat to the internal security” 

of the country, and he had ordered 

his agents to infiltrate their organizations. 

Although Hoover rarely travelled 

abroad, he wanted to transform the F.B.I. 

into an international spy apparatus, building 

upon the vast network that he had 

created within the U.S., which trafficked 

in raw history: wiretapped conversations, 

surveillance photographs, papers from 

garbage bins, intercepted cables, gossip 

from ex-lovers. 

The U.S. intelligence branches had 

not yet turned up evidence that Castro 

or his followers were Communists, and, 

given Batista’s brutality, some American 

officials were developing a soft stance 

toward the rebels. The C.I.A. officer in 

charge of Caribbean operations later acknowledged, 

“My staff and I were all 

Fidelistas.” 

But Hoover remained vigilant: of all 

the enemies that he had hunted, he considered 

the agents of Communism the 

“Masters of Deceit,” as he called his 1958 

best-selling book about them. These 

plotters had hidden streams of information, 

and they mutated, like viruses, in 

order to slip past a host’s defenses; Hoover 

was determined to stop them from 

infiltrating an island just south of Florida. 

A source inside the U.S. Embassy in Havana 

had informed him that Batista’s 

hold on the country was “weakening.” 

Now Hoover was receiving reports of a 

wild gringo up in the mountains. Was 

Morgan a Soviet sleeper agent? A C.I.A. 

operative in a cover posture? Or one who 

had gone rogue? 

After peering into so many lives, 

Hoover understood that virtually everyone 

has secrets. Scribbled in a diary. Recorded 

on a cassette. Buried in a safe-deposit box. 

A secret may be, as Don DeLillo has written, 

“something vitalizing.” But it can also 

cut you down at any moment. 

By late 1958, Hoover had unleashed a 

team of G-men to figure out what Morgan 

might he hiding. One of them eventually 

knocked on the door of a large Colonial 

house in the Old West End of Toledo, 

Ohio. A distinguished-looking gentleman 

greeted him. It was Morgan’s father, Alexander, 

a retired budget director of a utility 

company and, as his son once described 

him, a “solid Republican.” He was married 

to a slim, devout woman, Loretta, who was 

known as Miss Cathedral, for her involvement 

in the Catholic church down the 

street. In addition to their son, they had a 

daughter, Carroll. Morgan’s father told the 

F.B.I. agent that he had not heard from his 

son, whom he called Bill, since he disappeared. 

But he provided a good deal of information 

about Morgan, and this, combined 

with F.B.I. interviews of other 

relatives and associates, helped Hoover and 

his spies piece together a startling profile of 

the Yankee rebel. 

Morgan should have been a quintessential 

American, a shining product 

of Midwestern values and a rising 

middle class. He attended Catholic 

school and initially earned high marks. 

(His I.Q. test showed “superior intelligence.”) 

He loved the outdoors and was a 

dedicated Boy Scout, receiving the organization’s 

highest award, in 1941. Years 

later, he wrote to his parents, “You . . . 

have done all that is possible to bring up 

your children with love of God and country.” 

Wildly energetic, he always seemed 

to be chattering, earning the nickname 

Gabby. “He was so likable,” his sister told 

me. “He could sell you anything.” 

But Morgan was also a misfit. He 

failed to make the football team, and his 

constant banter exposed a seam of insecurity. 

He disliked school and often 

slipped away to read stories of adventure, 

especially tales about King Arthur and 

the Knights of the Round Table, filling 

his mind with places far more exotic than 

the neighborhood of cropped lawns and 

boxy houses outside his bedroom window. 

His mother once said that Morgan 

had a “very, very vivid imagination,” and 

that he had brought his fancies to life, 

constructing, among other things, a “diving 

helmet” worthy of Jules Verne. He 

rarely showed “fear of anything,” and 

once had to be stopped from jumping off 

the roof with a homemade parachute. 

U.S. Army intelligence officials also 

investigated Morgan, preparing a dossier 

on him. (The dossier, along with hundreds 

of other declassified documents 

from the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the Army, 

and the State Department, was obtained 

through the Freedom of Information 

Act and through the National Archives.) 

In the Army’s psychological assessment, 

a military-intelligence analyst stated that 

the young Morgan “seemed to be fairly 

well adjusted to society.” But, by the 

time he was a teen-ager, his resistance to 

the strictures around him, and to those 

who wanted to pound him into shape, 

had reached a feverish state. As his 

mother put it, he had decided that, if he 

would never belong in Toledo, he would 

embrace exile, venturing “out in the 

world himself.” 

In the summer of 1943, at the age of 

fifteen, Morgan ran away. His mother 

later gave a report to the Red Cross about 

her son, saying, “Shocked is the mild word 

for it…for he had never done anything 

like this before.” Although Morgan returned 

home a few days later, he soon 

stole his father’s car and “took off” again, 

as he later put it, blowing through a red 

light before the police caught him. He 

was consigned to a detention center, but 

he slipped out a window and vanished 

again. He ended up in Chicago, where he 

joined the Ringling Brothers circus. Ten 

days later, his father found him taking 

care of the elephants, and brought him 

home. 

In the ninth grade, Morgan dropped 

out of school and began roaming the 

country, hopping buses and freighters; he 

earned money as a punch-press operator, 

a grocery clerk, a ranch hand, a coal 

loader, a movie-theatre usher, and a seaman 

in the Merchant Marine. His father 

seemed resigned to his son’s fitfulness, 

telling him in a letter, “Get as much adventure 

as you can and we will be glad to 

see you whenever you decide you want to 

come home.” 

Morgan later explained that he had 

not been unhappy at home—his parents 

had given him and his sister “anything 

that we wanted”—and had fled only because 

he longed “to see new places.” 


His mother believed that he had a 

mythic image of himself, and “always 

seemed to yearn to be a big shot,” but, 

given his “super affectionate nature,” she 

doubted that “he has really meant to 

worry or hurt us.” 

Nevertheless, Morgan increasingly 

took up with “the wrong kind of gangs of 

boys,” as he later called them, and got in 

scrapes with the law. While still a minor, 

he and some friends stole a stranger’s car, 

temporarily tying up the driver; he was 

also investigated for carrying a concealed 

weapon. 

Nobody—not his parents, not the 

F.B.I., not the military-intelligence analyst—could 

unravel the mystery of Morgan’s 

antisocial behavior; it remained forever 

encrypted, an unbreakable code. His 

mother wondered whether something 

had happened to him during her pregnancy, 

lamenting, “That boy hasn’t given 

me a moment’s peace....That’s why my 

hair is gray.” His father told the F.B.I. 

that perhaps his son needed to see one of 

those head doctors. A psychiatrist, cited 

by Army intelligence, speculated that 

Morgan was “driven along a course of 

self-destruction in order to satisfy his 

neurotic need for punishment.” 

Yet it was possible to see Morgan, 

with his brooding blue eyes and cigarette 

perpetually clamped between his teeth, as 

heralding a new social type: a beatnik, a 

rolling stone. A friend of Morgan’s once 

told a reporter, “Jack Kerouac was still 

imagining life on the road while Morgan 

was out there living it.” 

Morgan’s personality—“nomadic, 

egocentric, impulsive, and utterly irresponsible,” 

as Hoover’s agents put it—also 

had some similarities with that of a middle-class 

teen-ager thousands of miles 

away. In 1960, a conservative American 

journalist observed, “Like Fidel Castro, 

though on a lesser scale, Morgan was a superannuated 

juvenile delinquent.” 

Hoover and the F.B.I. discovered 

that, contrary to press accounts, Morgan 

had not served during the Second World 

War. Envisaging himself as a modern 

Sinbad—his other nickname—he had 

tried to enlist but was turned away, because 

he was too young. It was not until 

August, 1946, when the war was over and 

he was finally eighteen, that he joined 

the Army. After receiving orders that he 

would be deployed to Japan, in December, 

he cried in front of his mother for the 

first time in years, betraying that, despite 

his toughness, he was still just a teen-ager. 

He boarded a train for California, where 

he had a layover at a base, and on the way 

he sent his parents a telegram: 

Have surprise—married yesterday 12:30 

am to Darlene Edgerton. Am happy—will 

write or call soon as possible. Don’t worry or 

get excited. 

He had sat beside her on the train, in 

his starched uniform. “He was tall and 

handsome and so magnetic,” Edgerton, 

who is now eighty-seven and blind, recalls. 

“Truthfully, I was coming home to 

marry someone else, and we just hit it off 

and so we stopped off in Reno and got 

married.” They had known each other 

for only twenty-four hours and spent two 

days in a hotel before getting back on a 

train. When they reached California, 

Morgan reported to the base and left for 

Japan. “What young people will do,” 

Edgerton says. 

With Morgan stationed in Japan, the 

marriage dissolved after a year and a half, 

and Edgerton received an annulment— 

though even after she married another 

man she kept a letter from Morgan 

stashed away, which she occasionally 

unfolded, flattening the edges with her 

fingers, and read again, stirred by the 

memory of the comet-like figure who 

had briefly blazed into her life. 

“How come I never see that smile?” 

Morgan was crestfallen by the end of 

the relationship, but his mother told the 

Red Cross, “Knowing Bill, I am sure if he 

had an opportunity to date other girls he 

would soon forget this present love.” 

Indeed, Morgan took up with Setsuko 

Takeda, a German-Japanese 

night-club hostess in Kyoto, and got her 

pregnant. When Takeda was about to 

give birth to their son, in the fall of 

1947, he could not get a leave, and so he 

did what he had always done: he ran off. 

He was arrested for being AWOL, and, 

while in custody, he claimed that he 

needed to see Takeda—she was suicidally 

distraught after being harassed by 

another soldier. With the aid of a Chinese 

national who was also locked up, 

Morgan overpowered a military-police 

officer and stole his .45. “Morgan told 

me not to move,” the officer later 

testified. “He told me to take off my 

clothes. Then he told the Chinaman to 

tie me up.” Wearing the guard’s uniform 

and carrying his gun, Morgan escaped 

in the middle of the night. 

A military search party located 

Takeda, and she led authorities to a 

house where Morgan had said he would 

wait for her. When she saw Morgan in 

the rear of the building, she threw her 

arms around him. One of the officers, 

seeing the gun in his hand, screamed,

“Hey! It’s just Vlad being Vlad.” 

• • 

“Drop it!” Morgan hesitated, then, like a 

character in a dime novel, spun the pistol 

on his finger, so that the butt faced the 

officer, and handed it over. “It didn’t take 

you long to get here,” Morgan said, and 

asked for a cigarette. 

On January 15, 1948, at the age of 

nineteen, Morgan was sentenced by a 

court-martial to five years in prison. “I 

guess I got what was coming to me,” he 

said. 

His mother, in her statement to the 

Red Cross, pleaded for help: “I sincerely 

want him to be a boy that I can justly be 

proud of, not one to hang my head in 

shame for having given him birth.” 

Morgan was eventually transferred to 

a federal prison in Michigan. He enrolled 

in a class on American history; 

studied Japanese and German, the languages 

Takeda spoke; attended “religious 

instruction classes”; and sang in 

the church choir. In a progress report, a 

prison official wrote, “The Chaplain has 

noticed that inmate Morgan has developed 

a sense of social responsibility” and 

“is doing everything possible to improve 

himself and be an asset to society.” 

Morgan was released early, on April 11, 

1950. Though he had once hoped to reunite 

with Takeda and their son, the relationship 

had been severed. Morgan 

eventually moved to Florida, where he 

took a job in a carnival, as a fire swallower, 

and mastered the use of knives. 

He began a romance with the carnival’s 

snake charmer, Ellen May Bethel. A 

small, tempestuous woman with black 

hair and green eyes, she was “gorgeous,” 

a relative says. In the spring of 1955, 

Morgan and Bethel had a child, Anne. 

They were married several months later, 

and in 1957 they had a son, Bill. 

Morgan struggled to be an “asset to 

society,” but he seemed trapped by his 

past. He was an ex-con and a dishonorably 

discharged soldier—a stain that he 

tried, futilely, to expunge from his record. 

Morgan later told a friend that, during 

this period, “he was nothing.” 

According to an F.B.I. informant, 

Morgan went to work for the Mafia, running 

errands for Meyer Lansky, the diminutive 

Jewish gangster known as Little 

Man. In addition to overseeing rackets 

in the United States, Lanksy had become 

the kingpin of Havana, controlling many 

of its biggest casinos and night clubs. A 

Mob associate once described how Lansky 

“took Batista straight back to our 

hotel, opened the suitcases and pointed at 

the cash. Batista just stared at the money 

without saying a word. Then he and 

Meyer shook hands.” 

Morgan drifted back to the streets of 

Ohio, where he became associated with 

a local crime boss named Dominick Bartone. 

A gangster whose Mafia ties reputedly 

went back to the days of Al Capone, 

Bartone was a hulking man with thick 

black hair and dark eyes—a “typical 

hoodlum appearance,” according to his 

F.B.I. file. He classified people as either 

“solid” or “suckers.” His rap sheet eventually 

included convictions for bribery, gunrunning, 

tax evasion, and bank fraud, 

and he was closely allied with the head of 

the Teamsters, Jimmy Hoffa, whom he 

called “the greatest fella in the world.” 

One of Morgan’s friends from Ohio 

described him to me as “solid.” He said, 

“Do you know what ‘connection’ means? 

Well, Morgan was connected.” The friend, 

who said that he had been indicted for 

racketeering, suddenly grew quiet, then 

added, “I don’t know if you’re with the 

F.B.I. or the C.I.A.” 

Some members of the Mafia, including 

Bartone, prepared for shifting alliances 

in Cuba, shipping guns to the rebels. 

Morgan’s father thought that his son 

first got caught up in the whole Cuba 

business in 1955, in Florida, when he apparently 

met Castro, who had travelled 

there to garner support from the exile 

community for his upcoming invasion. 

Two years later, with Castro ensconced in 

the Sierra Maestra, Morgan left his wife 

and children in Toledo and began acquiring 

weapons across the U.S. and arranging 

for them to be smuggled to the rebels. 

Perhaps he was motivated by sympathy 

with the revolution, or by a desire to make 

money, or simply by an urge to flee domestic 

responsibilities. Morgan’s father 

told the F.B.I. that his son had run away 

“from his problems since he was a youngster,” 

and that his Cuban escapade was 

just another example. Morgan, who before 

heading to Havana had told another 

gunrunner that he would see him again in 

Florida “when this damn revolution is 

over,” later gave his own explanation: “I 

have lived always looking for something.” 

To this day, some scholars, and even 

some who knew Morgan, speculate that 

he was sent to the Escambray by the 

C.I.A. But, as declassified documents reveal, 

Hoover and his agents had discov- 


ered something more unsettling. Morgan 

was not working for the agency or a foreign 

intelligence outfit or the Mob. He 

was out there on his own. 

“C 

WHY AM I HERE 

alling Comandante William 

Morgan! Comandante William 

Morgan!” 

It was one of his men in the Escambray, 

speaking on shortwave radio. 

“Hear me!” came Morgan’s reply. 

“Send us reinforcements. We need 

help—ammunition! If we stay here, they 

will wipe us out.” 

By the summer of 1958, Morgan had 

endured countless skirmishes. “We were 

always outnumbered at least thirty to 

one,” Morgan recalled. “We were a small 

outfit, but we were mobile and hard-hitting. 

We became known as the phantoms 

of the mountains.” 

Morgan had witnessed, up close, the 

cruelties of the Cuban regime: villages 

ransacked and burned by Batista’s Army, 

friends shot in the head, a senile man’s 

tongue cut out. “I know and have seen 

what these people have been doing,” 

Morgan said of Batista’s henchmen. 

“They killed. They tortured. They beat 

people...and done things that don’t have 

a name.” 

On one of his uniform sleeves, Morgan 

had sewn a U.S. flag. “I was born an 

American,” he liked to say. 

At night, he often sat by the campfire, 

where scattered sparks created fleeting 

constellations, and listened to the rebels 

share their visions of the revolution. The 

movement’s various factions—including 

two other groups in the Escambray and 

Castro’s forces in the Sierra Maestra— 

represented an array of ideologies and 

personal ambitions. The Escambray front 

advocated a Western-style democracy 

and was staunchly anti-Communist, a 

stance that was apparently shared by 

Fidel Castro, who, unlike his brother 

Raúl or Che Guevara, had expressed little 

interest in Marxism-Leninism. In the 

Sierra Maestra, Castro told a reporter, “I 

have never been, nor am I now, a Communist. 

If I were, I would have sufficient 

courage to proclaim it.” 

In the Escambray, Morgan and 

Menoyo had grown increasingly close. 

Morgan was older, and almost suicidally 

brave, like the brother of Menoyo’s who 

had died in the Batista raid. Morgan addressed 

Menoyo as “mi jefe y mi hermano”—“my 

chief and my brother”—and 

told him about his troubled past. Menoyo 

felt that Morgan was maturing, as a soldier 

and a man. “Little by little, William 

was changing,” Menoyo says. 

In July, after Morgan was promoted to 

comandante, he wrote a letter to his 

mother, something that he had not done 

during his six months in the mountains. 

Written with a distinctive flourish of 

dashes, it said, “I know that you neither 

approve or understand why I am here— 

even though you are the one person in the 

world—that I believe understands me—I 

have been many places—in my life and 

done many things of which you did not 

approve—or understand, nor did I understand 

myself—at the time.” 

He contended with his old sins, acknowledging 

how much pain he had 

caused Ellen, his second wife, and their 

children (“these three who I have hurt 

deeply”) by abandoning them. “It is hard 

to understand but I love them very deeply 

and think of them often,” he wrote. Ellen 

had filed for divorce, on the ground of desertion. 

“I don’t expect she has much faith 

or love for me any more,” Morgan wrote. 

“And probably she is right.” 

Yet he wanted his mother to understand 

that he was no longer the same 

person. “I am here with men and boys— 

who fight for . . . freedom,” he wrote. 

“And if it should happen that I am 

killed here—You will know it was not 

for foolish fancy—or as dad would say a 

pipe dream.” The friend who had also 

smuggled weapons to the rebels later 

told the Palm Beach Post, “He had 

found his cause in Cuba. He wanted 

something to believe in. He wanted to 

have a purpose. He wanted to be someone, 

not no one.” 

Morgan had composed a more philosophical 

statement about why he had 

joined the rebels. The essay, titled “Why 

Am I Here,” said: 

Why do I fight here in this land so foreign 

to my own? Why did I come here far from 

my home and family? Why do I worry about 

these men here in the mountains with me? Is 

it because they were all close friends of mine? 

No! When I came here they were strangers to 

me I could not speak their language or understand 

their problems. Is it because I seek 

adventure? No here there is no adventure 

only the ever existent problems of survive. So 

why am I here? I am here because I believe 

that the most important thing for free men to 

do is to protect the freedom of others. I am 

here so that my son when he is grown will 

not have to fight or die in a land not his own, 

because one man or group of men try to take 

his liberty from him I am here because I believe 

that free men should take up arms and 

stand together and fight and destroy the 

groups and forces that want to take the 

rights of people away. 

In his rush to overturn Cuba’s past as 

well as his own, Morgan often forgot to 

pause for periods or paragraph breaks. 

He acknowledged, “I can not say I have 

always been a good citizen.” But he explained 

that “being here I can appreciate 

the way of life that is ours from 

birth,” and he recounted the seemingly 

impossible things that he had seen: 

“Where a boy of nineteen can march 12 

hours with a broken foot over country 

comparable to the american Rockies 

without complaint. Where a cigarette is 

smoked by ten men. Where men do 

without water so that others may 

drink.” Noting that U.S. policies had 

propped up Batista, he concluded, “I 

ask myself why do we support those 

who would destroy in other lands the 

ideals which we hold so dear?” 

Morgan sent the statement to someone 

he was sure would sympathize with 

it: Herbert Matthews. The Times reporter 

considered Morgan to be “the 

most interesting figure in the Sierra de 

Escambray.” Soon after receiving the 

statement, Matthews published an article 

about the Second Front and its “tough, 

uneducated young American” leader, citing 

a cleaned-up passage from Morgan’s 

letter. 

Other U.S. newspapers began chronicling 

the exploits of the “adventurous 

American,” the “swashbuckling Morgan.” 

The Washington Post reported 

that he had become a “daring fellow” by 

the age of three. The accounts were 

enough to “make schoolboys drool,” as 

one newspaper put it. A retired businessman 

from Ohio later told the Toledo 

Blade, “He was like a cowboy in an 

Ernest Hemingway adventure.” Morgan 

had finally willed his interior fictions 

into reality. 

One day in the spring of 1958, while 

Morgan was visiting a guerrilla 

camp for a meeting of the Second Front’s 

chiefs of staff, he encountered a rebel 

he had never seen before: small and slender, 

with a face shielded by a cap. Only up 

close was it evident that the rebel was a 


woman. She was in her early twenties, 

with dark eyes and tawny skin, and, to 

conceal her identity, she had cut her curly 

light-brown hair short and dyed it black. 

Though she had a delicate beauty, she 

locked and loaded a gun with the ease 

of a bank robber. Morgan later said of a 

pistol that she carried, “She knows how 

to use it.” 

Her name was Olga Rodríguez. She 

came from a peasant family, in the central 

province of Santa Clara, that often 

went without food. “We were so poor,” 

Rodríguez recalls. She studied diligently, 

and was elected class president. 

Her goal was to become a teacher. She 

was bright, stubborn, and questioning— 

as Rodríguez puts it, “always a little 

different.” Increasingly angered by the 

Batista regime’s repressiveness, she 

joined the underground resistance, organizing 

protests and assembling bombs 

until, one day, agents from Batista’s secret 

police appeared in her neighborhood, 

showing people her photograph. 

“They were coming to kill me,” Rodríguez 

recalls. 

When the secret police could not find 

her, they beat up her brother, heaving 

him on her parents’ doorstep “like a sack 

of potatoes,” she says. Her friends begged 

her to leave Cuba, but she told them, “I 

will not abandon my country.” In April, 

1958, with her appearance disguised and 

with a tiny .32 pistol tucked in her underwear, 

she became the first woman to join 

the rebels in the Escambray. She tended 

to the wounded and taught rebels to read 

and write. “I have the spirit of a revolutionary,” 

she liked to say. 

When Morgan met her, he gently 

teased her about her haircut, pulling 

down her cap and saying, “Hey, muchacho.” 

Morgan had arrived at the camp 

literally riding a white horse, and she 

had felt her heart go “boom, boom, 

boom.” 

“I am a great romantic, and I was so 

moved that someone from another 

country would care enough about my 

countrymen to fight for them,” she says. 

Morgan repeatedly sought her out at her 

camp. She would sometimes prepare 

him rice and beans (“I’m a guerrilla, not 

a cook”), and he would complain, “Too 

fast!” as she spoke, in gunfire-patter 

Spanish, about the need to hold elections 

and build hospitals and schools. She 

seemed unlike so many of the women 

whom he had impetuously taken up 

with. Like his mother, she had a deep 

sense of conviction, and it was her 

influence, Menoyo says, that furthered 

“William’s transformation,” though 

Rodríguez saw it differently: Morgan 

was not so much changing as discovering 

who he really was. “I knew William had 

not always been a saint,” Rodríguez says. 

“But inside, I could tell, he had a huge 

heart—one that he had opened not just 

to me but to my country.” 

Morgan recognized the risk of surrendering 

to a flight of emotion in the midst 

of war. The Batista regime had placed 

a twenty-thousand-dollar bounty on 

him—“dead or alive,” as Morgan put it. 

Once, when Morgan and Rodríguez 

were together, a military plane shut down 

its engines, so that they could not hear its 

approach until bombs were falling upon 

them. “We simply had to dive for cover,” 

Rodríguez recalls. They barely escaped 

unharmed. During other bombing raids, 

they would hold each other, whispering, 

“Our fates are intertwined.” 

When Robert Jordan is overcome 

with love for a woman during the Spanish 

Civil War, he fears that they will never 

experience what ordinary people do: “Not 

time, not happiness, not fun, not children, 

not a house, not a bathroom, not a 

clean pair of pajamas, not the morning 

paper, not to wake up together, not to 

wake and know she’s there and that you’re 

not alone. No. None of that.” 

As long as Morgan was fighting in the 

Escambray, there could be no past or future—only 

the present. “We could never 

have peace,” Rodríguez says. “From the 

beginning, I had this terrible feeling that 

things would not end well.” Yet the impossibility 

of their romance only deepened 

their ardor. Not long after they met, 

a boy from a nearby village approached 

Rodríguez in camp, carrying a bunch of 

purple wildflowers. “Look what the 

Americano has sent you,” the boy told her. 

A few days later, the boy appeared again, 

holding a new bouquet. “From the Americano,” 

he said. 

As Morgan later told her, they had to 

“steal time.” In one such moment, a photographer 

caught them standing in a 

mountain clearing. In the image, both are 

wearing fatigues; a rifle is slung over his 

right shoulder, and she leans on one, as if 

it were a cane. With their free hands, they 

are clutching each other. “When I found 

you, I found everything I can wish for in 

the world,” he later wrote her. “Only 

death can separate us.” 

ORGAN WAS KILLED THE PREVI- 

“M OUS NIGHT IN THE COURSE OF A 

FIGHT WITH THE CUBAN ARMY.” So 

read an urgent cable sent from the U.S. 

Embassy in Havana to Hoover, at F.B.I. 

headquarters, on September 19, 1958. 

The Batista regime, which had already 

leaked the news to the Cuban press, 

mailed the F.B.I. two photographs of a 

fractured corpse, shirtless and smeared 

with blood. 

Morgan’s mother was devastated when 

she heard of the reports. Several weeks 

later, she received a letter from Cuba, in 

Morgan’s hand. It said, “The Cuban press 

last month sent out word that I was dead 

but as you can tell I am not.” 

Just as Batista’s regime had falsely declared 

Castro’s death, it had made the 

mistake of believing its own propaganda 

about Morgan, becoming trapped in the 

closed circuit of information that isolates 

tyrants not only from their countrymen 

but from reality. Meanwhile, Morgan’s 

seeming emergence from the dead, like 

one of Mulholland’s magical feats, created 

a potent counter-illusion: that he 

was indestructible. 

In October, Che Guevara arrived 

in the Escambray, with a hundred or 

so ghostly-looking soldiers. They had 

completed a six-week westward trek from 

the Sierra Maestra, withstanding cyclones 

and enemy fire and sleeping in 

swamps. Guevara described his men as 

“morally broken, starving...their feet 

bloodied and so swollen they won’t fit 

into what’s left of their boots.” Guevara— 

whom another rebel once depicted as 

“half athletic and half asthmatic,” and 

prone to shifting in conversation “between 

Stalin and Baudelaire”—had dark 

hair nearly to his shoulders. During the 

march, he had worn the cap of a dead 

comrade, but, to his distress, he had lost 

it, and so he began wearing a black beret. 

The ranks of the Second Front had 

grown to more than a thousand men. 

Morgan wrote to his mother, “We are 

much stronger now,” and said that his 

men were “getting ready to come down 

from the hills and take the cities.” 

Guevara had been sent to the Escambray 

to take control of the Second Front, 


COURTESY OLGA MORGAN GOODWIN 

Morgan and Olga Rodríguez, in 1958. Their relationship, she says, was “un gran amor.” 

as Castro was eager to eliminate any 

threat to his dominance and to accelerate 

the assault on Batista. But many rebels 

there resisted having their authority 

usurped, and submerged tensions between 

the groups rose to the surface. 

When Guevara and his men tried to enter 

a stretch of territory, they were confronted 

by a particularly combative leader of the 

Second Front, Jesús Carreras. After demanding 

a password from Guevara, Carreras 

refused to let him or his men pass. 

Morgan and Guevara, the two foreign 

comandantes, bitterly distrusted each 

other. The boisterous, fun-loving, anti- 

Communist American had little in common 

with the ascetic, erudite, Marxist- 

Leninist Argentine doctor. Morgan 

complained to Guevara that he had misappropriated 

weapons belonging to the 

Second Front, while Guevara dismissed 

Morgan and his defiant guerrillas as 

comevacas—“cow-eaters”—meaning that 

they sat around and lived off the largesse 

of peasants. Although Guevara and the 

Second Front reached an “operational 

pact,” friction remained. 

In November, 1958, before a climactic 

push against Batista’s Army, Morgan 

slipped away with Rodríguez to a farmhouse 

in the mountains, where they arranged 

to get married. They wore their 

rebel uniforms, which they had washed in 

the river. They didn’t have rings, so Morgan 

took a leaf from a tree, rolled it into a 

circle, and placed it on her finger, vowing, 

“I will love you and honor you all the days 

of my life.” Rodríguez said, “Hasta que la 

muerte nos separe”—“Till death do us part.” 

After the ceremony, Morgan picked 

up his gun and returned to battle. “We 

barely had time to kiss,” Rodríguez recalls. 

As the fighting intensified, she had 

a growing sense of unease. To keep her 

company, he had given her a parrot that 

cried “We-liam” and “I love you!” But one 

day it flew off, and never returned. 

In late December, Guevara and his 

party launched a ferocious assault in the 

Santa Clara province, winning a decisive 

victory. That month, Morgan and the 

Second Front seized the tobacco town of 

Manicaragua, then pressed onward, capturing 

Cumanayagua, El Hoyo, La 

Moza, and San Juan de los Yeras, before 

reaching Topes de Collantes, a hundred 

and sixty miles southeast of Havana. 

One of Batista’s colonels warned, 

“Headquarters can’t resist anymore. The 

Army doesn’t want to fight.” The Second 

Front had earlier issued a statement 

declaring that “the dictatorship is nearly 

crushed,” and the U.S. government tried 

to push out Batista, in a futile attempt to 

install an acquiescent “third force.” Batista 

resisted the Americans’ pressure, 

but his hold on power was nearly gone. 

At 4 A.M. on New Year’s Day, David 

Atlee Phillips, a C.I.A. agent stationed in 

Havana, was standing outside his home 

there, drinking champagne, when he 

looked up and saw a speck of light—an 

airplane—receding into the sky. Realizing 

that there were no departing flights at 

that hour, he telephoned his case officer, 

and offered a gem of information: “Batista 

just flew into exile.” 

“Are you drunk?” the case officer 

replied. 

But Phillips was right—Batista was 

escaping, with his entourage, to the Dominican 

Republic—and word rapidly 

spread throughout Cuba: “Se fue! Se fue! ” 

He’s gone! 

Meyer Lansky was in Havana at the 

time, and was among the first people 

there to be tipped off. “Get the money,” 

he commanded an associate. “All of it. 

Even the cash and checks in reserve.” 

After dawn, Morgan was preparing to 

battle for the city of Cienfuegos when the 

cry reached him and Rodríguez: Se fue! Se 

fue! Morgan ordered his men to take the 

city immediately. Everyone, including 

Rodríguez, jumped into cars and trucks, 

racing into a city where they had expected 

an intense battle but where Batista’s 

Army, once impregnable, dissolved before 

them as thousands of jubilant residents 

poured into the streets, honking 

horns and banging on makeshift drums. 

The crowds greeted Morgan, who 

wrapped a rebel flag around his shoulders 


like a cape, to shouts of “Americano!” 

Morgan, who told reporters, “I’m forgetting 

my English,” cried at the crowds 

grasping at him, “Victoria! Libertad!” 

In an interview with Look, Morgan 

said, “When we came down from the 

mountains, it was a shock to all of 

us...to find how much faith the Cuban 

people had in this revolution. You felt 

you simply couldn’t betray their hopes.” 

Morgan was put in charge of Cienfuegos. 

He had finally become somebody, 

he told a friend. On January 6, 1959, at 

one in the morning, Castro paused in 

Cienfuegos during his triumphant march 

to Havana. It was the first time that Morgan 

had met with Castro in Cuba, and 

the two former delinquents shook hands 

and congratulated each other. 

In interviews, Castro repeated his opposition 

to Communism and promised 

to hold elections within eighteen months. 

Before a gathering of thousands in Havana, 

he vowed, “We cannot become dictators.” 

Whatever doubts Morgan had 

about Guevara, he seemed to harbor 

none about Castro, who once declared, 

“History will absolve me.” 

“I have a tremendous admiration—a 

tremendous respect—for the man,” Morgan 

later told the American television 

broadcaster Clete Roberts. “I respect his 

moral courage, and I respect his honesty.” 

Morgan cast the revolution in his own 

distinctive terms: “It’s about time the little 

guy got a break.” 

Roberts observed that Morgan’s life, 

including his romance with Rodríguez, 

sounded “like all of the movie scripts that 

were ever dreamt about in Hollywood.” 

Morgan insisted that he had no interest 

in selling his story: “I don’t believe that 

you should cash in on your ideals. I don’t 

believe I was an idealist when I went up 

into the mountains, but I feel that I’m an 

idealist now.” 

Morgan had not slept for two days 

after Batista fled, and he welcomed the 

chance to shave and wash the jungle 

grime off his body. Rodríguez soon 

changed out of her uniform, confident 

that “the war was over and that we would 

raise a family and live in a democracy.” In 

Cienfuegos, they exchanged proper wedding 

rings. Rodríguez says, “I cannot describe 

the happiness I felt—we felt.” 

Rodríguez had become pregnant. For 

Morgan, it suddenly seemed that he and 

Rodríguez could have everything: a house, 

children, the morning paper. As Morgan 

put it, “All I’m interested in is settling 

down to a nice, peaceful existence.” 

THE CONSPIRACY 

In March, 1959, a mysterious American 

suddenly appeared at the Hotel Capri, 

where Morgan and Rodríguez were staying 

temporarily. The man, who was in his 

late forties, had stiff black hair and thick 

glasses, and looked like he could be an 

employee of NASA, the new space agency. 

“I still say we pull it and deal with the consequences 

of its being a false alarm when they come.” 

In the lobby, he called Morgan and said 

that he needed to see him. His name was 

Leo Cherne. “I’m sure he never heard of 

me before,” Cherne recalled, in an unpublished 

oral history. 

Imposing, learned, and discreet, 

Cherne was a wealthy businessman and a 

power broker who had advised several 

U.S. Presidents, including Franklin 

Roosevelt and Eisenhower. In 1951, he 

became chairman of the International 

Rescue Committee. Over the years, there 

was speculation that, under Cherne, the 

I.R.C. had sometimes served as a front 

for C.I.A. activities—a charge that 

Cherne publicly denied. In any case, he 

was enmeshed with people in intelligence 

circles, a man who relished being privy to 

a cloak-and-dagger world. 

In his oral history, Cherne said that he 

had once been “deeply attracted” to Castro, 

rivalling Herbert Matthews in his 

“blind enthusiasm.” But Cherne had 

grown apprehensive after the revolution. 

With disturbing coolness, Castro had 

dispatched several hundred members of 

Batista’s regime “to the wall,” and his indeterminate 

ideology, his instinctive 

defiance, and his gargantuan ambition 

posed serious risks. 

And so the C.I.A. sought to put more 

eyes and ears around Castro, eventually 

assigning him the cryptonym AMTHUG. 

Morgan must have seemed like a tantalizing 

target for recruitment. He had a 

built-in cover and access, spoke Spanish, 

and, as a U.S. citizen, seemed easier to 

turn: he would not have to become a traitor 

to his country. Morgan’s support for 

Castro and the revolution presented an 

impediment, but, as any seasoned case 

officer knew, virtually everyone had a “soft 

spot”: greed, jealousy, sexual temptation. 

One simply needed to find the spot and 

inflame it, until the target breached a system 

of beliefs for a system of information, 

for silent calls and dead drops. 

It seemed that Morgan had a spark of 

resentment that could catch fire. Castro, 

wary of rivals, had denied prominent government 

positions to many members of the 

Second National Front of the Escambray, 

including Menoyo. Adam Clayton Powell, 

a congressman from New York, had just 

returned from a fact-finding mission in 

Cuba, where he had overheard Morgan— 

whom he described as “a sweet guy, but 

very tough”—criticizing the new regime. 

At the Hotel Capri, Cherne was sur-

prised to find that Morgan occupied a 

small, sparely furnished room. Rodríguez 

had gone out, but armed barbudos— 

bearded guerrillas—kept entering and 

exiting, as if the cramped room were a 

makeshift headquarters. Morgan wore 

his rebel uniform, the star of a comandante 

emblazoned on each epaulet. His revolver 

rested on a dresser. 

Cherne told Morgan that he had 

sought him out to promote the I.R.C.’s 

work in Cuba and to obtain an audience 

with Castro, but Morgan was wary. He 

knew that Havana had become a city of 

spooks, and Cherne had shown him an 

I.R.C. brochure featuring William Joseph 

(Wild Bill) Donovan—the famous 

spymaster of the Second World War, 

who was an honorary chairman of the 

committee’s board. Morgan suspected 

that Cherne was an American intelligence 

officer representing “very substantial 

and powerful forces.” 

As they conferred, Morgan, perhaps 

believing that his secrets would be safe 

with a professional keeper of them, confessed 

something that he had not revealed 

even to his closest friends, including 

Menoyo. Morgan admitted that the 

story he had told about an American 

friend being killed by Batista was a fabrication—a 

sleight of hand that had allowed 

him to sneak himself into the narrative 

of history. “Morgan told the truth, 

trusting that I would not take it public,” 

Cherne recalled. Morgan touched on his 

troubled past, and Cherne believed that 

Morgan was “courageous, tough, able, 

resourceful but a bad boy. . . . And it was 

this bad boy who found in the developing 

events in Cuba something exciting.” 

Cherne observed how well Morgan 

spoke Spanish, how he commanded respect 

from the rebels passing through the 

room, and how bright he seemed, despite 

having only an eighth-grade education. 

“I’ve rarely met a person as genuinely articulate, 

as clever, in some ways brilliant, 

as I found him to be, all by instinct,” 

Cherne noted. 

He soon returned to the Capri for another 

meeting. This time, a barbudo lay 

sprawled on the bed, apparently dozing. 

Morgan, even then the loose-lipped 

Gabby, said that he wanted to disclose 

something “very important.” 

Cherne looked around anxiously, and 

asked, “How do you know the room is 

secure?” 

“It’s ‘She’s driving me crazy and I’m not sure whom to turn to.’ ” 

Morgan assured him that it was, but 

Cherne pointed to an air-conditioning 

vent, where a bug might be installed. “I 

must apologize,” Morgan said. “You are 

absolutely right.” He picked up a transistor 

radio, placed it in front of the vent, 

and cranked up the music. 

Cherne was still concerned about the 

Cuban on the bed. Morgan’s “blithe willingness 

to take risks was not altogether to 

my taste,” Cherne recalled. But, sensing 

that Morgan had “irresistible” information, 

he let him proceed and, with his 

permission, even used a miniature recording 

device that he had brought with him. 

Morgan confided that Guevara and Raúl 

Castro were Marxist-Leninists who 

threatened the revolution. Guevara had 

enlisted someone to kill him, but Morgan 

had captured the agent and, before letting 

him go, obtained a written confession, 

which he had stashed away. “That is the 

insurance policy which will keep me 

alive,” Morgan claimed. 

Cherne asked Morgan if he thought 

that Fidel Castro was a Communist. 

• • 

Morgan said no and emphasized that 

many Cubans were committed to democracy. 

Cherne found Morgan’s tale of 

intrigue “filled with perceptive fact.” 

Morgan expressed the hope that 

Cherne could use his influence to secure 

foreign economic aid for some three 

thousand families in the Escambray who 

had been “bombed out” during the war. 

And he said he was worried that the U.S. 

government would revoke his citizenship, 

as some anti-Castro elements were clamoring 

for. Cherne suspected that he had 

pinpointed Morgan’s soft spot: the Yankee 

comandante wanted to make sure that, 

if things grew too dangerous, he could return 

to America with his family; he feared 

being left out in the cold. 

Cherne believed that Morgan was not 

seeking personal advantage. Rather, Morgan 

was hoping to “even the score” with 

his beloved country, where he had fallen 

short as a citizen and a soldier. “This was 

his act of expiation,” Cherne concluded. 

Morgan handed Cherne a 1946 fivecentavo 

coin. Its edge had a small notch. If 


Cherne wanted to send someone to see 

him in the future, he should give that person 

the coin for presentation to Morgan—a 

sign of trustworthiness. 

After Cherne left the hotel, with the 

coin and the recording of their conversation 

tucked away, he grew anxious that he 

had been spied upon. Why had he taken 

such a foolish risk? Cherne scribbled on 

paper what he had learned, put it in an 

envelope, and slipped it to a trusted friend 

in Havana. “Just in case I didn’t get out,” 

he recalled. 

Cherne returned to his hotel and remained 

in his room. The phone rang, but 

he did not answer it. “I heard footsteps 

outside my door, and I sweated freely,” he 

recalled. Finally, he rushed to the airport, 

waited an “interminable period,” and 

“wasn’t relieved until the plane took off.” 

On March 20th, Cherne went to 

C.I.A. headquarters—then a complex of 

shabby buildings on E Street, in Northwest 

Washington, D.C. A sign saying 

“U.S. Government Printing Office” had 

once hung out front, but, after President 

Eisenhower and his driver struggled to 

find the entrance, it was replaced with the 

C.I.A.’s emblem. 

Cherne was ushered through security 

and into the French Room, a conference 

space used by senior C.I.A. officials, 

where he met with the acting chief of the 

Western Hemisphere Division. Cherne 

debriefed him about his encounter with 

Morgan, which he considered one of the 

“most incredible and fascinating accidental 

exposures to political reality in my entire 

life.” The C.I.A. cultivates its own 

private language, and Cherne, who was 

identified in a classified document about 

Morgan simply as “HQS contact,” was 

serving as a spotter—someone who 

identifies a potential asset for recruitment. 

Cherne told the C.I.A. that Morgan 

could be very valuable, as he was on 

excellent terms with Castro. And Cherne 

passed on Morgan’s coin—the kind of 

object that the magician Mulholland 

called a “recognition signal.” 

A C.I.A. report concluded that Morgan 

had “KUCAGE possibilities.” In his 

1975 book, “Inside the Company,” Philip 

Agee, a former C.I.A. officer who turned 

against the agency and allegedly assisted 

Castro’s regime, revealed that KUCAGE 

stood for highly sensitive psychological 

and paramilitary operations. “They are action 

rather than collection activities,” Agee 

wrote. “Collection operations should be 

invisible so that the target will be unaware 

of them. Action operations, on the other 

hand, always produce a visible effect. This, 

however, should never be attributable to 

the C.I.A. or to the U.S. government.” 

Not long after Castro took power, the 

C.I.A. began to seek out action operators 

who could press the “magic button”: assassination. 

In addition to commissioning 

Mulholland’s manuals, the C.I.A. 

had created a document titled “A Study 

of Assassination.” After noting that the 

“morally squeamish should not attempt 

it,” the study laid out various techniques: 

The most efficient accident . . . is a fall of 

75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator 

shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and 

bridges will serve....The act may be executed 

by sudden, vigorous [lifting] of the ankles, 

tipping the subject over the edge. 

If the subject is deliberately run down, 

very exact timing is necessary and investigation 

is likely to be thorough....The subject 

may be stunned or drugged and then placed 

in the car, but this is only reliable when the 

car can be run off a high cliff or into deep 

water without observation. 

At the end of March, the C.I.A. authorized 

a background investigation of 

Morgan—“a.k.a. ‘El Americano.’ ” Its 

THE OVERHAUL 

Look—it’s the Lively, 

hauled out above the tide line 

up on a trailer with two 

flat tires. What— 

fourteen-foot? Clinker-built 

and chained by the stern 

to a pile of granite blocks 

but with the bow 

still pointed westward 

down the long voe, 

down toward the ocean 

where the business is. 

Inland from the shore 

a road runs, for the crofts 

scattered on the hill 

where washing flaps, 

and the school bus calls 

and once a week or so 

the mobile library; 

but see how this 

agents needed more “biographical data” 

before trying to recruit Morgan. On 

March 30th, the agency’s Central Cover 

Division requested that it be advised 

immediately when Morgan had been 

“activated.” 

Two weeks later, Castro arrived in 

Washington, D.C., on what he billed as 

a “good will” tour. President Eisenhower 

declined to meet with him, but, when 

Castro appeared in public, wearing his 

rumpled green fatigues and empty pistol 

holster, he was cheered by Americans 

who saw him as a folk hero. “Viva Castro!” 

they shouted. 

Around this time, as Aran Shetterly, 

the biographer, recounts, another curious 

guest appeared at the Hotel Capri. He 

was a reputed bagman for the Mob 

named Frank Nelson. The Mob feared, 

correctly, that Castro planned to shutter 

its casinos and night clubs. (“We are not 

only disposed to deport the gangsters, but 

to shoot them,” Castro later proclaimed.) 

Nelson said that a friend in Miami 

was interested in Morgan’s “services.” 

“In my services?” Morgan asked, 

confused. 

It was Nelson’s turn to look around 


duck-egg-green keel’s 

all salt-weathered, 

how the stem, taller 

—like a film star— 

the room nervously. In a hushed voice, he 

said, “My friend is ready to pay you well 

if you help him.” He paused. “A million 

dollars.” 

The conversation continued in Miami, 

where Morgan met in a secure 

hotel room with Nelson’s “friend.” It was 

the Dominican Republic’s consul there, 

who was serving as yet another gobetween, 

in order to conceal the true 

identity of the plotters. One of the masterminds 

was Rafael Trujillo, the tyrant 

who had ruled the Dominican Republic 

for three decades, and who was even 

more sadistic than Batista. His security 

chief likened his rule to that of “Caligula, 

the mad Caesar.” 

One of Trujillo’s maxims was “He 

who does not know how to deceive does 

not know how to rule,” and he had a penchant 

for scheming to kill his opponents 

abroad. In 1956, Trujillo allegedly orchestrated 

the kidnapping, in New York, 

of a lecturer at Columbia University who 

had served in the Trujillo government, 

and was about to publish a doctoral thesis 

critical of the regime. After being 

taken back to the Dominican Republic 

and delivered to Trujillo, the scholar was 

than you’d imagine 

is raked to hold steady 

if a swell picks up 

and everyone gets scared . . . 

No, it can’t be easy 

when the only spray to touch 

your boards all summer 

is flowers of scentless mayweed; 

when little wavelets leap 

less than a stone’s throw 

with your good name 

written all over them— 

but, hey, Lively, 

it’s a time-of-life thing, 

it’s a waiting game: 

patience, patience. 

—Kathleen Jamie 

believed to have been stripped naked, tied 

to a rope on a pulley, then lowered, 

slowly, into a vat of boiling water. Now 

Trujillo wanted to eliminate Fidel Castro. 

In the hotel room in Miami, Trujillo’s 

consul was joined by Batista’s former 

chief of police. (Batista, still in the Dominican 

Republic, was helping to bankroll 

the operation.) Also present was a 

broad-chested, dapper man whom Morgan 

recognized from his days in organized 

crime: Dominick Bartone. After 

the revolution, the gangster had sought 

out Morgan, trying to sell the Castro regime 

several Globemaster military cargo 

airplanes. Bartone was now trying to sell 

the planes to the plotters seeking to overthrow 

Castro. Bartone’s ally Jimmy Hoffa 

had allegedly attempted to siphon three 

hundred thousand dollars from the 

Teamsters’ pension fund to float the deal. 

One of Hoffa’s aides later informed the 

government that the scheme “was purely 

and simply Hoffa’s way of helping some 

of his Mob buddies who were afraid of 

losing their businesses in Cuba.” 

The men in the hotel room represented 

interests tied to the Mob, the 

Teamsters, Batista, and Trujillo, a longtime 

ally of the United States. These divergent 

lethal forces had found coherence 

in a single audacious plot. 

As they tried to persuade Morgan, 

they, too, probed for his soft spot. “I understand 

that you and your people have 

been treated badly,” Nelson had said in 

his pitch. “Besides, a million dollars is always 

a million dollars.” 

To the rest of the world, Morgan 

might have become the Yankee comandante. 

But the plotters were confident 

that, deep down, he was still good ol’ Billy 

Morgan. 

“We’ll give you everything you ask 

for,” Batista’s former police chief said. 

Morgan soon got back to them. He 

let them know that he had consulted 

with Menoyo, and that they had given 

careful thought to what had happened 

in Cuba since the revolution. And Morgan 

said that he, along with members of 

the Second Front, was ready to join the 

conspiracy. 

Hoover sensed that something was 

afoot. There were reports from informants 

that, in recent months, Morgan 

had received tens of thousands of dollars 

from the Dominican consul, the cash 

often stuffed in “common paper bags.” 

There were whispers that Morgan, who 

had moved with Rodríguez into a house 

in Havana, was being ferried messages 

from a priest acting in the interest not of 

God but of Rafael Trujillo. And there 

were rumors that, in Florida, Morgan 

had met with Johnny Abbes García, the 

head of Trujillo’s secret police, who was a 

master at extracting information (he had 

studied Chinese methods of torture) and 

at concealing it (he reputedly had an affair 

with Trujillo’s half brother). “JOHNNY 

went to Miami to make contact with 

MORGAN,” an F.B.I. report said, adding 

that Abbes García and his bodyguard had 

“a good time in a calypso nightclub.” 

Hoover and his men tried to detect a 

hidden design in the data they were collecting. 

They were witnessing history 

without the clarity of hindsight or narrative, 

and it was like peering through a 

windshield lashed with rain. As Hoover 

confronted the gaps in his knowledge, he 

became more and more obsessed with 

Morgan. A former fire-eater at the circus! 

Hoover hounded his evidence men to 

“expedite” their inquiries, homing in on 

Morgan’s ties to Dominick Bartone. The 


mobster, whom the bureau classified as 

“armed and dangerous,” had recently 

been arrested with his associates at Miami 

International Airport, where they had 

been caught loading a plane with thousands 

of pounds of weapons—a shipment 

apparently destined for mercenaries and 

Cuban exiles being trained in the Dominican 

Republic. 

The incident had not only intensified 

Hoover’s scrutiny of Morgan and the 

plotters; it also aroused the interest of the 

Senate Rackets Committee and its chief 

counsel, Robert F. Kennedy, who was investigating 

links between Hoffa’s Teamsters 

and organized crime. At a hearing in 

June, 1959, Kennedy demanded, “Do we 

have any background on Mr. Morgan?” 

When a Teamster official was questioned 

by the committee about the weapons 

scheme, he said, more than once, “I decline 

to answer because I honestly believe 

my answer may tend to incriminate me.” 

Another witness, however, acknowledged 

that Morgan had “worked for Bartone 

in years past.” 

While the F.B.I. tracked Morgan’s 

movements, he made repeated forays to 

Miami, where he met with his conspirators. 

That summer, he also travelled to 

Toledo for a visit with his mother and father, 

whom he had not seen since leaving 

for Cuba, a year and a half earlier. His 

parents savored the brief reunion, but 

they could tell that Morgan was feeling 

“heat and pressure,” as he later put it. 

When his mother looked at his clothing 

and belongings, she noticed that there 

wasn’t any identification on him—he’d 

become a man from nowhere. 

She asked him what kind of trouble he 

was getting into now. 

Nothing, he assured her. 

But she sensed that he was planning 

to pull off, as she later put it, yet another 

“trick.” 

The hand is not “quicker than the eye,” 

Mulholland warned in his spy manuals. 

The key to an illusion is to make the 

audience explain away the fact that it has 

been deceived in plain sight. 

On July 27, 1959, Morgan flew again 

to Miami, this time with Rodríguez. 

Eight months pregnant, she provided 

some cover. Still, Morgan was stopped by 

authorities at the airport in Miami and 

taken to a holding room, where he was 

confronted by two men with closecropped 

hair, dark suits, and dark ties: 

Hoover’s agents. 

After apprising Morgan of his rights, 

the agents pressed him about why he had 

come to Miami. He insisted that he was 

there to have fun with his wife for a few 

days, but, under further questioning, he 

admitted that a representative of a foreign 

government had contacted him about 

leading a counter-revolution in Cuba. 

“Subject refused to identify the individuals 

with whom he was in contact,” the 

agents wrote in a report. 

Morgan said that he was in a “precarious 

position.” The agents eventually let 

him go, but Hoover ordered his men to 

monitor Morgan’s movements by “employing 

physical surveillances and utilizing 

other confidential techniques.” The 

F.B.I. reported that “subject’s pregnant 

wife was seen being driven from the 

Montmartre Hotel in a 1959 blue Cadillac.” 

The agents traced the car: it belonged 

to Dominick Bartone. 

On July 31st, Morgan phoned the 

F.B.I., letting its agents know that Rodríguez 

had returned to Cuba. He said that 

he planned to go back himself, on a Pan 

American flight, in two days. Within 

hours of the call, though, he took off, 

leaving his belongings in his hotel room. 

The agents tried to pick up his trail, but 

he had vanished. 

On the night of August 6th, the F.B.I. 

subsequently learned, Morgan boarded a 

small fishing vessel, in a “clandestine 

manner,” and rendezvoused off the coast 

of Miami with a fifty-four-foot yacht 

manned by two mercenaries. The vessel 

was stripped of any name or registration 

number, and was loaded with machine 

guns, explosives, and other armaments. 

With Morgan aboard, the yacht set off 

for Cuba and, after eluding the U.S. 

Coast Guard and nearly running out of 

fuel, slipped into Havana Harbor, on August 

8th. 

Hoover believed that he was worming 

his way inside the conspiracy. One F.B.I. 

source reported that Morgan was planning 

to “assassinate Castro.” Another said 

that the plot was to take out Fidel and 

Raúl Castro. According to multiple 

sources, a strike force of nearly a thousand 

Cuban exiles and mercenaries would be 

transported, by plane, from a base in the 

Dominican Republic to Trinidad, a colonial 

town at the foot of the Escambray 

Mountains. Once these forces landed, it 

was believed, they would be led by Morgan, 

whom a cable from the U.S. Embassy 

described as “an enigma.” 

Morgan had received from Trujillo a 

shortwave radio—a bulky contraption 

with dozens of thick black dials. Morgan 

set it up on a wooden desk in his house, 

and after turning the dials he heard the 

scratchy sound of a voice: Trujillo’s killer 

spy, Abbes García, in the Dominican 

Republic. 

An informant later told the F.B.I. that 

Abbes García operated his radio every 

evening after midnight, and often identified 

himself by saying, “This is the Red 

Cow.” 

Morgan was given the code name 

Henry—a reference to Henry Morgan, 

the seventeenth-century Welsh privateer, 

who had been commissioned by the English 

crown to plunder gold from Cuba, 

then a Spanish colony. Once, when 

Henry Morgan found himself trapped by 

a Spanish armada, he floated toward the 

enemy a ship, rigged with incendiary materials 

and wooden dummies, which then 

exploded, allowing him to escape, in one 

of the greatest ruses in seafaring history. 

William Morgan flicked on the 

shortwave radio late one August 

night. “Henry speaking,” he said. “Come 

in...Come in...” 

The Red Cow picked up his signal, 

and Morgan told him that the plot had 

begun. “Our troops are advancing,” he 

said. 

Abbes García could hear bombs and 

gunfire in the background. 

“Forward, Henry!” came the jubilant 

reply. 

Hoover and other high-level officials 

at the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the Navy, the 

Army, the Air Force, and the State Department 

circulated intelligence about 

Morgan and his plot. Urgent wire reports 

were issued: “Fidel’s home in Cojimar 

shot...Reliable sources state small group 

attacked Raúl’s home...Whereabouts 

Morgan not known...Telephone communications 

to Las Villas and Camagüey 

provinces cut...Rumors of fighting... 

Armed services on full alert...Expecting 

something further, probably invasion...Havana 

Harbor will be bombed at 

4:00 a.m....It is expected that Castro will 

be finished.” 

Hoover and his colleagues picked up 

intelligence that Morgan and other 


members of the Second Front, including 

Menoyo and Jesús Carreras, had gathered 

in Trinidad, where they had secured a 

muddy airstrip, effectively cutting the island 

in two. Trujillo was heard broadcasting 

a message to the Cuban people, saying, 

“Fire, fire, fire to that demon Fidel 

Castro and his brother Raúl!” Trujillo 

began to air-drop dozens of crates of 

.50-calibre ammunition to Morgan and 

his followers, the billowing white parachutes 

seesawing down from the clouds. 

When another supply plane returned, its 

crew reported seeing lit bombs tracing 

paths across the night sky, as if there were 

an electrical storm. On August 12th, 

Morgan, who had brought the shortwave 

radio with him, spoke to Trujillo, and 

told him that his forces had captured the 

town. “Trinidad is ours!” Morgan said. 

“Don’t let us down.” 

The following evening—Castro’s 

thirty-third birthday—Trujillo dispatched 

to Cuba a plane carrying the first 

members of the strike force. As the soldiers 

disembarked at the airstrip in Trinidad, 

which had been marked with lights, 

they could hear Morgan and his men 

shouting denunciations of Castro, and, as 

they joined in, the cries grew louder and 

more intense, converging, like voices at 

a stadium, in a deafening incantation: 

“DEATH TO CASTRO!” 

Then a towering, bearded figure, who 

had also been chanting, emerged from 

where he was hiding, under a mango tree. 

It was Fidel Castro. 

Morgan had pulled off a trick within 

a trick. He was not a counter-revolutionary—he 

was a double agent. He and the 

Second Front had been colluding with 

Castro; the radio messages, the cutting of 

communications, and the exploding 

bombs had all been part of the stagecraft 

of what Morgan described as a “fictitious 

war.” 

Morgan and those loyal to Castro 

pointed machine guns at the stunned 

fighters from the strike force. One of 

Trujillo’s men later said, “I should not be 

judged as a conspirator, but as an imbecile.” 

Soldiers from the strike force drew 

their guns, and for a moment the plotters 

and the counter-plotters peered at one 

another, as if still puzzling over who had 

crossed whom. Then a few of Trujillo’s 

men opened fire, and everyone began 

shooting. One of Morgan’s friends ran 

toward the plane and was killed. By the 

time the fusillade ended, two members of 

the strike force had died, and the rest had 

been apprehended. 

Morgan had helped break the first 

major counter-revolutionary plot against 

the Castro regime. Later, during a fivehour 

televised address that lasted until 

three in the morning, Castro explained 

what had happened. Morgan, smiling 

and wearing his crisp rebel uniform, appeared 

beside him. During the previous 

few months, he and Castro had spent 

hours scheming. Castro was seen draping 

his long arm around Morgan, his 

prized double agent. He hailed Morgan 

as a “Cuban,” and Morgan referred to 

Castro as his “faithful friend.” Menoyo 

recalls, “They had complete trust in one 

another.” 

The Yankee comandante revealed to 

the public that, after being approached to 

lead the counter-revolution, he and 

Menoyo had alerted Castro, who directed 

them to draw out their enemies. 

Castro said in his televised address, “Everyone 

played his assigned parts. It was 

better than a movie.” Herbert Matthews, 

in a letter to Hemingway, described the 

events as “stranger than fiction but real.” 

Morgan and Menoyo had been so 

convincing in their roles as counterrevolutionaries 

that Leo Cherne, and 

others, suspected that they had originally 

been part of the conspiracy, switching 

sides only when they were about to be discovered. 

But, according to Menoyo and 

others involved in the scheme, they had 

not turned against Castro—who remained 

revered in Cuba, and who had 

reaffirmed his support of democratic principles 

during his April visit to Washington. 

Despite Morgan’s concerns about the 

Castro regime, he stated emphatically 

that he and members of the Second Front 

would “never unite” with brutes like Trujillo 

or Batista. 

On August 20th, Morgan called the 

F.B.I. agents who had pursued him in 

Miami, and apologized for not having 

been more forthcoming. He explained 

that he had not wanted to “sell out Cuba,” 

where he had many friends. He added 

that he didn’t think that he had broken 

any American laws, though he might 

have “bent” them slightly. 

The Secret Service launched an investigation 

of Morgan and recommended 

that no action be taken against this man 

of “unquestioned courage,” given that he 

posed no threat to “the safety and welfare 

of our President.” But Hoover fumed 

over the deception, and in September the 

State Department stripped Morgan of his 

citizenship. 

The C.I.A. made no effort to intercede 

on Morgan’s behalf. That May, according 

to declassified documents, the 

agency had cancelled its effort to recruit 

him, after a background check turned up 

evidence of his criminal youth and his 

scandalous military record. An internal 

memorandum had noted, “Station 

strongly feels any covert arrangement 

with Morgan undesirable from security

with his growing family, and was eager to 

help build a new Cuban society. “I’m a 

Cuban now,” he said. “And I believe in 

the revolution.” Or, as he later put it, “I 

am betting my life that the revolution 

succeeds.” 

standpoint.” In the end, the authentic nature 

of Morgan’s rebelliousness made him 

too unpredictable: better to deal with 

someone simply looking for a score. 

Trujillo—who was later assassinated 

in a C.I.A.-assisted plot—placed a halfmillion-dollar 

bounty on Morgan’s head. 

When Clete Roberts, the American 

broadcaster, visited Morgan’s house, in 

September, 1959, he found it surrounded 

by bodyguards with Thompson submachine 

guns. “I ought to tell you back in 

the United States that Mr. Morgan and I 

are sitting in what you might call an 

armed camp,” Roberts said. He asked 

Morgan, “How does it feel to have a halfmillion-dollar 

price on your head?” 

Morgan replied coolly, “Well, it isn’t 

too bad. They are going to have to collect 

it. And that’s going to be hard.” 

The Castro government made Morgan 

a Cuban “citizen by birth” and promised 

to protect him. The Associated 

Press wrote that he had obtained “almost 

legendary stature” on the island, and 

Cherne said that he had become “the 

hero of the republic.” Morgan further 

bolstered his reputation when he handed 

over to the Cuban government seventyeight 

thousand dollars that he had received 

from the Dominican consul, asking 

that the money be invested in 

economic development in the Escambray 

region. When Morgan walked 

along the streets of Havana, people 

reached out to touch him; there was even 

a popular song celebrating his exploits. 

• • 

In August, Rodríguez gave birth to a 

daughter, who was named for Morgan’s 

mother, Loretta. Rodríguez recalls that 

Castro showed up at the clinic to congratulate 

her and Morgan. “He wanted to 

be the godfather,” Rodríguez says, though 

the honor went to Menoyo. 

Morgan was astonished that so many 

Cubans had embraced him. “These are 

people who never saw me before in their 

lives,” he told Roberts. “They never knew 

me. They just know me by what I’ve done 

or how I’ve been with them.” 

He said that the revolution had been 

fought for a beautiful idea—freedom— 

and that he was not willing to abandon 

the promises that he had made in the 

mountains. Though a few Marxist- 

Leninists had tried to “sneak” into power 

amid the turmoil in the country, he said, 

the Cuban people were too individualistic 

to accept such a system. “Communism 

breeds on ignorance and poverty,” 

he said. “And the first thing that the 

revolution is doing is creating schools 

and creating jobs and creating homes 

and giving people land in which they can 

increase their income.” He acknowledged 

that many of Cuba’s revolutionaries 

were young and inexperienced, and 

had made mistakes; but their main political 

aim remained helping “the little guy.” 

Though Morgan was anguished over 

losing his American citizenship—“The 

greatest thing that ever happened to me 

was to have been born in the United 

States,” he once said—he was content 

THEY’RE GONNA GET YOU! 

Morgan did not take a post in the 

Castro government, saying, “I’ve 

never been a politician—I’m a soldier.” 

But he remained an adventurer, and in 

the fall of 1959 he set up a bold experiment 

in Cuba’s swamps, under the auspices 

of the National Institute of Agrarian 

Reform. Earning a small monthly 

salary, he built several nurseries, including 

one in the Escambray, that bred bullfrogs 

for their tender meat and valuable skins, 

which could be used to make wallets and 

belts and purses. 

Morgan began with a few frogs, but 

they quickly multiplied, the tadpoles becoming 

stout creatures that, with their 

legs extended, were as long as a foot. The 

nurseries were soon filled with a mass of 

croaking creatures devouring, whole, virtually 

anything they could swallow— 

bugs, fish, mice, even other frogs—the 

wild proliferation continuing until Morgan 

presided over a kingdom of more 

than half a million frogs. It was like the 

story of Exodus that he had read as a 

child: “And the magicians did so with 

their enchantments, and brought up frogs 

upon the land of Egypt.” 

Morgan often worked eighteen-hour 

days, digging a network of shaded trenches 

to accommodate his ever-growing stock. 

The Cuban press hailed Morgan’s project 

as a “miracle,” and when a reporter 

asked him if he had used architectural diagrams 

to lay out the farms he replied, 

“Blueprints, your ass. I dug those fucking 

ditches.” 

He hired hundreds of peasants to operate 

the farms, delivering the kind of 

economic opportunity that he and the 

rebels had promised during the revolution. 

Viola June Cobb, an American who 

had worked as a secretary for Fidel Castro, 

later testified secretly before a Senate 

subcommittee, and said that Morgan was 

“a boy with ideals” who had a “tremendous 

desire to be helpful,” and that 

through his farms he had improved the 

lives of some two thousand peasants. 

“The ones I had seen in rags and barefoot 


now were wearing shoes and stockings, 

looking decent,” she said. 

Dignitaries and reporters travelled to 

the swamps to see the famed Yankee 

comandante and double agent. An article 

in Time called him the “Improbable 

Frogman.” Morgan projected his usual 

buoyant self. “Cuban frogs’ legs are tops,” 

he’d say. Or “Cuba shipped a million dollars’ 

worth of frogs’ legs to the U.S. last 

year. I’m going to double that.” 

On July 31, 1960, Rodríguez gave 

birth to a second girl, Olguita. Before 

Morgan came to Cuba, he had been a neglectful 

father, and he regretted it. He had 

sent a letter to Anne, his daughter from 

his second marriage, who was now five: 

When I saw you last you were just a little 

tyke....You use to sit in the window and 

when you saw my car drive in you would 

say—Daddy Daddy....And I know when I 

did not come home any more I know you 

missed me and looked out the window for 

your dad—this was a long time ago baby and 

possibly you don’t remember—but I do— 

And always will. 

Morgan now doted on his baby girls, 

having concluded that a man who has 

“his family is probably the happiest person 

in the world.” In a debriefing by the 

C.I.A., a reporter said of Morgan, “He 

seemed happy and secure.” 

But, after foiling the Trujillo conspiracy 

and helping to save the revolution, he 

grew increasingly uneasy with the political 

forces that he had helped to unleash. 

Morgan had predicted to the F.B.I. that 

the influence of radicals, such as Guevara 

and Raúl Castro, would diminish in 

Cuba. But Fidel had placed Raúl in 

charge of the armed forces, and appointed 

as head of the national bank Guevara, 

who pushed for increased state control 

over the economy. 

On October 19th, Huber Matos, a 

heralded rebel commander, resigned 

from the government, protesting the 

growing influence of Communists. In a 

letter to Fidel Castro, he wrote, “Please, 

in the names of our fallen comrades, of 

our mothers, of all the people, Fidel, do 

not bury the revolution.” Two days later, 

Matos was arrested. He was sentenced to 

twenty years in prison. 

Earlier that year, in March, the White 

House had approved a top-secret plan to 

topple the Castro regime. The operation 

came to eerily resemble the Trujillo conspiracy. 

A brigade of more than a thousand 

Cuban exiles—this time secretly 

trained by the U.S., at a base in Guatemala—would 

invade by sea, landing at a 

beach in the town of Trinidad. B-26 

bombers would preëmptively strike Castro’s 

Air Force to protect the brigade, 

which, if necessary, could escape into the 

Escambray Mountains. It was the most 

ambitious covert operation in U.S. history. 

At a White House meeting, President 

Eisenhower told the plan’s architects, 

“Everyone must be prepared to 

swear that he has not heard of it.” 

That summer, while preparations for 

an invasion were under way, the C.I.A. 

pushed the magic button. In another 

echo of the Trujillo plot, the agency 

turned to members of the Mafia, including 

an associate of Lansky’s, to assassinate 

Castro. Various stratagems were 

considered, including blowing Castro’s 

head off with an exploding cigar, jabbing 

him with a poison-filled Paper Mate 

pen, and contaminating a diving suit 

with tuberculosis germs. 

Amid this blur of plots and counterplots, 

Morgan struggled to find clarity. No 

longer close with Castro, he could not tell 

if the Cuban leader was reacting to provocations 

from Washington, or if he was 

being undermined by more radical elements 

in the government, or if he was revealing 

that, beneath his rebel garb, he was 

just another dictator, willing to grasp any 

ideology that would consolidate his power. 

One day, members of the Communist 

Party tried to organize a meeting on one 

of Morgan’s farms. He expelled them, 

saying, “Fidel and Raúl know that I’m 

against the Communists.” 

A friend of Morgan’s from the Second 

Front recalls, “I said to William, ‘You 

have to be careful. You’re talking too 

much.’ But William loved to talk.” 

In April, 1960, a reporter observed of 

Morgan, “Behind the bravado one 

senses confusion, regret, anxiety over what 

lies ahead.” In Havana, Morgan’s house 

had been shot at more than once—perhaps 

by agents of Trujillo or perhaps by an 

unknown enemy. “One time, they killed 

our dog,” Rodríguez recalls. Afterward, 

Morgan moved the family into an apartment 

building protected by more than a 

dozen guards, many of whom lived with 

them. “It always seemed that we could 

never be alone,” he once said to Rodríguez. 

An informant told the C.I.A. that 

Morgan’s “every move was being watched 

by the Cuban military.” Rodríguez suspected 

that two of the bodyguards living 

with them were spying for the G-2, Castro’s 

military-intelligence service. “I 

wanted them out,” she recalls. But Morgan 

did not wish to be disloyal. In this 

sense, Morgan was not a classic double 

agent, for he was someone who wanted to 

believe. “He always trusted people,” Rodríguez 

says. Still, he took precautions, 

choosing his own driver, and going to 

work in a blue Oldsmobile outfitted with 

two submachine guns and a glove compartment 

stuffed with grenades. 

Morgan had no desire to flee Cuba. 

As he later told his mother, “It would 

have been necessary to be a traitor to myself, 

my friends and my beliefs.” He continued 

tending to his frogs, with their 

deafening chorus. 

One day, Morgan learned that his 

rebel comrade Jesús Carreras, now an 

antagonist of the regime, had been 

picked up by state security, in Santa 

Clara. Morgan raced to the military barracks 

there, and demanded that the 

guards release Carreras. “I’m a comandante!” 

Morgan shouted, pointing to his 

star. The guards complied, and Morgan 

escorted Carreras away, mindful of the 

warning that another rebel colleague had 

given him: “Watch out! They’re gonna 

get you!” 

Morgan considered seeking political 

asylum for his family. But he had confessed 

to one reporter, “I’ve run out of 

countries,” and noted to another that “a 

guy in the middle can so easily get 

caught.” 

Cuba’s drift toward Communism 

continued, and several of Morgan’s 

friends returned to the Escambray, to 

take up arms against the regime. As Michael 

D. Sallah reported a decade ago, in 

an illuminating account in the Toledo 

Blade, Morgan started to have weapons 

smuggled into the mountains in the fall 

of 1960. “Every week, trucks would carry 

them up,” a worker told me. Once, Mor- 


gan was planning to take a shipment to 

a hideout himself, but Rodríguez said 

that it was too dangerous. Everyone will 

recognize you, she said, insisting on 

transporting the weapons herself. “We 

had an argument,” she recalls. Rodríguez 

prevailed, and this time it was Morgan 

who anxiously waited at home. 

His opposition to the regime became 

more vocal. “If anything happens to me, 

you’ll know the Commies have really 

taken over,” he told one reporter, and said 

to another, “I don’t know how long I’m 

going to last.” 

Still, Viola Cobb, the secretary, says 

that Morgan did not completely lose faith 

with Castro: “He had the idea that he was 

standing by, and that when Fidel finally 

realized that the Communists were taking 

over he would blow the whistle, and 

William Morgan and Gutierrez Menoyo 

and some of the others would help him 

rescue the country.” 

On October 19th, two days after the 

Eisenhower Administration recalled Philip 

Bonsal, its Ambassador to Cuba, presaging 

the end of diplomatic ties, Morgan was 

summoned to a meeting at the National 

Institute for Agrarian Reform. He brought 

a handbag made from frog skin—a gift for 

the wife of one of the officials. 

Rodríguez and Morgan had plans that 

evening, but by seven o’clock he had not 

returned home. “He was always punctual,” 

Rodríguez recalls. Her premonitions 

coming back in a rush, she left the 

children with their nanny and told Morgan’s 

driver to take her to the institute. 

At the institute’s gate, she shouted at 

a guard, “Where’s William?” 

“William had to go someplace,” he 

said. 

“I need to see William. I have to see 

him.” 

“William said you should come 

with us.” 

The guards began encircling the 

car, and she told the driver, “Go! Go!” 

“I wonder if we could allow women a greater role 

in religion other than as sacrifices?” 

They sped away, returning home, but 

state-security guards soon barged 

through the apartment door. “I’m the 

wife of Comandante Morgan,” she said, 

trying to intimidate them. But they 

shoved her aside and searched the apartment, 

terrifying the girls, one of whom 

was two months old, the other fourteen 

months. 

Rodríguez learned what had happened 

to Morgan: upon entering the institute, 

he had been surrounded by state 

security and taken to G-2 headquarters. 

Jesús Carreras had been rounded up, too. 

Rodríguez had been right about the two 

bodyguards at the apartment: they were 

spies. 

Rodríguez could not get permission 

to see Morgan, who had been placed in 

detention. According to an account that 

Morgan wrote in prison, which was later 

smuggled out of the country and obtained 

by the C.I.A., Cuban militaryintelligence 

officials interrogated him. “I 

said I would only talk to Fidel,” Morgan 

wrote. For nearly a month, he was in solitary 

confinement. He became violently 

ill and, fearing that the government 

was trying to poison him, made himself 

vomit to purge any toxins. 

After a month, he was moved to La 

Cabaña, the prison overlooking Havana 

Harbor. Several times, he discovered 

ground glass in his food. He still felt extremely 

sick, and asked another prisoner 

if he had any medicine to “kill pain.” 

When the man said yes, Morgan pleaded, 

“Shoot it into my arm.” He didn’t trust 

the guards to do it. The man obtained a 

syringe from a prison doctor and injected 

Morgan with the medicine. 

In December, Menoyo, who says that 

he had not participated in the smuggling 

of weapons into the Escambray, visited 

Morgan at La Cabaña. “You are my chief 

and my brother,” Morgan told him. 

Menoyo, who had lost both of his siblings 

to war, replied, “You are my brother.” 

They embraced. 

Not long after Menoyo left the 

prison, he and a dozen members of the 

Second Front fled the country, on three 

small fishing vessels, and headed for 

America. 

On December 31st, Rodríguez, who 

had been placed under house arrest, was 

permitted to see her husband. Rats scurried 

in the corners of the crowded meeting 

room. Though she did not want to

upset Morgan, she told him that she was 

being held prisoner in their home, and 

that she had little water or food. “No one 

is allowed to visit,” she said. “The babies 

are sick.” 

Morgan urged her to flee—to get the 

children out of Cuba before it was too 

late. “If you can, go to Toledo,” he said. 

“My mother will help you.” 

He took her hand. “Everything’s 

going to be O.K.,” he said. But Rodríguez, 

who rarely betrayed fear, was scared. 

“I was so worried about him and what 

would happen to our baby girls,” she recalls. 

After five minutes, the guards said 

that her time was up. 

“I love you with every part of me,” he 

said. They stole a kiss before being 

separated. 

That night, when Rodríguez returned 

home, she crushed sleeping pills into 

hot chocolate and offered the drink to the 

men guarding her. At two in the morning, 

when all the guards appeared to be 

asleep, she gathered her daughters. 

“Hush,” she whispered to them. When 

the baby began to cry, she gave her a toy, 

and then, carrying both girls in her arms, 

she crept out of the house. She went to the 

Brazilian Embassy, where she was given 

sanctuary after telling the Ambassador 

and his wife, “Please, I’m in big trouble.” 

Morgan was also trying to break free. 

He studied the design of La Cabaña and 

the routine of the guards, looking for a 

flaw in the system. “Morgan had all kinds 

of escape plots,” another prisoner later 

told the C.I.A. Morgan worked to regain 

his strength. A press attaché at the U.S. 

Embassy later wrote, “Up at dawn, he 

would put himself through calisthenics, 

then march around the compound, 

shouting commands at himself.” The inmate 

who had given Morgan painkillers 

recalled, “He exercised like an athlete and 

marched like a soldier.” Morgan turned 

increasingly toward his Catholic faith. 

He wore a rosary and often prayed. 

Hiram González, a twenty-four-yearold 

revolutionary who had been arrested 

for conspiring against the regime, had 

just arrived at La Cabaña, and watched in 

despair as prisoners were taken out and 

killed by firing squads, while birds 

swooped down to “peck at the bits of 

bone, blood, and flesh.” Morgan, he recalls, 

tried to cheer him up, offering his 

mattress. When Morgan found him crying 

in a corner, he went up to him and 

said, “Chico, men don’t cry.” 

“At times like this, I’m not a man.” 

Morgan put his hand on his shoulder. 

“If it helps your suffering, then it’s O.K.” 

Morgan walked him around the prison 

yard until he felt better. “He was the only 

one to help,” González recalls. 

Two days later, on March 9, 1961, 

guards seized Morgan and escorted him 

across the compound to a room where a 

military tribunal was being held. Along 

the way, Morgan, trying to summon 

courage, murmured song lyrics to himself: 

“Over hill, over dale, we have hit the 

dusty trail/And those caissons go rolling 

along.” 

There were eleven other defendants at 

the tribunal, including Carreras. Rodríguez 

was tried in absentia. A few weeks 

earlier, Che Guevara had published an 

essay denouncing members of the Second 

Front. “Revolutions, accelerated radical 

social changes, are made of circumstances,” 

he wrote. “They are made of 

passions, of man’s fight for social vindication, 

and are never perfect.” The mistake 

of the Cuban Revolution, Guevara argued, 

was its accommodation of men like 

the Second Front commanders. “By their 

presence, they showed us our sin—the sin 

of compromise...in the face of the actual 

or potential traitor, in the face of those 

• • 

weak in spirit, in the face of the coward.” 

He went on, “Revolutionary conduct is 

the mirror of revolutionary faith, and 

when someone calls himself a revolutionary 

and does not act as one, he can be 

nothing more than heretical. Let them 

hang together.” 

At the trial, Morgan and Carreras 

were charged with conspiracy and treason. 

Later, Fabián Escalante, who served 

for many years as the head of Cuban 

counter-intelligence, detailed the case 

against Morgan, claiming that he had 

been a longtime American intelligence 

operative—a “chameleon”—who, in 

1960, had attempted to “organize, for the 

C.I.A., a band of counter-revolutionaries 

in the Escambray.” 

Without a doubt, the C.I.A. was trying 

to foment the new insurgency in the 

mountains. But U.S. documents, which 

have since been declassified, suggest 

that Morgan was never a C.I.A. operative. 

Indeed, an agency memorandum 

dated October 5, 1960—two weeks before 

Morgan’s arrest—voiced “strenuous 

objections” to the idea of using him. 

This followed an inquiry by Army intelligence, 

which had concluded that 

enlisting Morgan would be “extremely 

worthwhile.” (The Army had considered 

sending him a “secret writing system”—most 

likely, one involving invisi- 


le ink.) After Morgan’s arrest, an Army 

internal memo noted that Morgan had 

not become a registered operative. 

“William was never an American 

agent,” Menoyo says. “It is simply a lie by 

the Castro regime to justify its actions.” 

At the tribunal, Morgan complained 

that his lawyer had only just learned of the 

charges against him. Morgan and Carreras, 

branded pseudo-revolutionaries, 

faced death by firing squad. 

The prisoner who had given Morgan 

the painkillers recalled, “The whole prison 

was agog with the news that Morgan and 

Carreras were actually going to stand trial. 

Not even the most zealous of the young 

rebels believed that Fidel Castro would 

shoot these two men, who had played 

such a big role in the Cuban Revolution.” 

Morgan denied that he had ever been 

a foreign agent and said, “I have defended 

this revolution because I believed 

in it.” He explained, “If I am found 

guilty, I will walk to the execution wall 

with no escort, with moral strength, and 

with a clear conscience.” 

A young man in the back of the courtroom, 

ignoring warnings by authorities, 

spoke out on Morgan’s behalf. It was the 

rebel who had broken his foot in the Escambray. 

“William would not abandon 

me,” he recalls. 

The trial lasted little more than a day. 

A defendant’s fate was usually signalled 

by which room he was taken to before the 

verdict. “If you went to the right, you 

went into a copiea, a little chapel-like 

room, and you knew you were going to 

get shot,” a prisoner recalled. “For most 

prisoners, if you went to the left, you got 

thirty years.” 

Most of the defendants were led to the 

left. Rodríguez, who was twenty-four, 

also received a thirty-year sentence. Morgan, 

along with Carreras, was led to the 

right, and condemned to die the next day. 

An American radio broadcaster at the 

trial told his listeners that he had witnessed 

“a farce.” 

Morgan asked to speak one last time 

to his mother, but the request was denied. 

Morgan had written Loretta a five-page 

letter on La Cabaña stationery—“the 

longest letter I have ever written,” he told 

her. (The letter was recently uncovered, 

by Michael Sallah.) Morgan understood 

that the very cause that had helped save 

his life would likely lead to his death. “I 

have been prepared for this as long as I 

68 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 28, 2012 

have been in prison,” he wrote. “For after 

all it is not when a man dies but how.” 

Morgan knew that he had to get the 

letter past government censors, so his criticisms 

of Castro were oblique. “No man 

has a right to impose his will or beliefs on 

others,” Morgan wrote. “I feel sorry for 

those who accuse me and who are responsible 

for what will pass. They accuse with 

fear in their hearts and ambition in their 

minds not knowing that good never 

comes of evil.” Morgan was ready to give 

his life for Cuba: “The way of freedom is 

hard—and the road is covered with the 

blood of those who must die so that the 

rights of man can live.” He wanted to protect 

what he considered sacred about the 

revolution, and believed that only in time 

would a proper verdict be rendered on his 

life: “Humans leave their actions to be 

judged by other people in the pages of history 

so it is not what we do but the result 

of what we do that is finally judged.” 

Morgan went on, “I write these things 

as they run through my mind so that by 

reading this you might better know what 

kind of man is your son....Raising a boy 

like me was not an easy task or did we always 

agree what was the right thing to do. 

But I have always worshipped you and 

dad.” He told his mother, “Don’t cry for 

me. I know that you understand. The life 

of a man is in the hands of god and he 

calls when he is ready for us. It is very few 

who are fortunate enough to have time to 

prepare to meet him. If now is my time I 

will be ready and am looking at death not 

with fear but with expectation. God bless 

you....Until we meet again, take care of 

Olga and the children.” 

Loretta could not so easily accept his 

fate, and launched a furious campaign to 

save him. She enlisted the local office of 

the F.B.I. and contacted the White 

House, which responded, “We fully understand 

and deeply sympathize with 

your anxiety for your son.” 

After Cuban officials denied Morgan’s 

request to talk to his mother, he asked if he 

could say goodbye to Rodríguez. Again, he 

was refused. So Morgan sent her a letter, 

knowing that the only thing that could 

ever separate them was upon them. “As a 

writer of love letters I am not so good,” he 

said. “To tell you that I love you, it’s not 

sufficient, because words could never express 

my feelings towards you. Since the 

first time I saw you in the mountains until 

the last time I saw you in prison, you have 

been my love, my happiness, my companion 

in life and in my thoughts during my 

moment of death.” He regretted how little 

time they had spent together, and he recalled 

the “beautiful plans” that they had 

made to settle in the “mountains with the 

girls, living in peace and tranquility.” 

He tried to console her, assuring her 

that he was not afraid, and did not consider 

death “an enemy.” Though some 

members of the Second Front had vowed 

to retaliate if he was killed, Morgan told 

Rodríguez that he did not want anyone 

to seek revenge on his behalf, not even 

against the bodyguards who had betrayed 

him. “They are young and will have to 

fight with their conscience,” he said. “I do 

not want blood spilled over my cause. . . 

. It’s better that I die because I have defended 

lives. I only ask that someday the 

truth will be known and that my daughters 

will be proud of their father.” He told 

her, “I have great peace in my spirit,” because 

at least she and the girls were safe. 

In fact, things were in tumult. A few 

days earlier, a distraught Rodríguez had 

learned that several of their allies were 

planning a last-minute assault on La 

Cabaña. In a kind of delirium, Rodríguez—who 

later cut her hair short and 

dyed it black, as she had when she first 

went into the mountains—told the wife 

of the Brazilian Ambassador that she 

needed to leave for a few days. Protect my 

daughters until I return, she said. The 

Ambassador’s wife, with whom she had 

grown close, pleaded with her not to go. 

“I have to save William,” Rodríguez said. 

Carrying her .32, she slipped into the 

trunk of a waiting car, and raced away. 

Morgan, meanwhile, was granted permission 

to see his girls, and one of Rodríguez’s 

relatives brought them to La 

Cabaña. Morgan was briefly allowed to 

talk to them, to hold them. Morgan told 

Rodríguez, in his letter, “Let them know 

someday who their father was, and what 

my beliefs and ideals were.” Earlier, he’d 

sent a note to Bill, his son from his second 

marriage, who was now four. Saying that 

he could “speak from experience, most of 

it hard,” Morgan told him, “Love your 

God—and Your Country—and Stand 

Up for both,” adding, “And I know that 

your Country . . . will Always be proud of 

you.” In his letter to Anne, he had said: 

When the time comes for you to get married 

and have a family of your own. Pick a good 

man Baby—One with his head high but both

feet on the ground—And if you find one who 

wants to see the world—or dreams of castles in 

the sky—let him see the world—honey—by 

himself—Possibly you may never see this letter. 

But if you do, remember your dad was one of 

those people—who saw the world—And its 

very hard for those who love such a man. 

Not long after Rodríguez left the Brazilian 

Embassy, Castro’s forces smashed 

the plot to liberate Morgan, killing or arresting 

many of the conspirators. Rodríguez, 

meanwhile, sought refuge in a safe 

house, in Santa Clara. 

Late in the evening on March 11th, 

Carreras was taken before the firing 

squad and shot. Five minutes afterward, 

Morgan—who had made his plea 

to speak with Castro directly—was 

brought outside. Morgan prayed the 

whole way, then removed the rosary 

around his neck and gave it to a priest, 

asking that his mother receive it. As he 

had written her, “I leave a love of God 

and country.” 

Through the floodlights, Morgan 

peered at the muzzles of the rifles. There 

was no longer any hope of escape. No 

more castles in the sky. 

According to a prisoner’s account, a 

voice in the distance shouted, “Kneel and 

beg for your life.” 

It was the last thing that Morgan could 

control. “I kneel for no man,” he said. 

One of the executioners shot him in 

the right knee. The Yankee comandante 

tried to stay on his feet, blood spilling 

around him. Then he was shot in the left 

knee. Finally, he collapsed, and was repeatedly 

shot in the torso and head. His 

face, a witness said, was “blown off.” 

“Many of the men in the patio were 

crying,” the prisoner who had provided 

medicine recalled. “The rumbling, that 

almost rose to the pitch of a riot, was a 

tribute to William Morgan’s popularity.” 

Rodríguez, sequestered in the safe 

house, did not yet know of her husband’s 

death, but she felt a presence in her 

room. “I saw William,” she says. “I felt 

him give me a kiss. No sound. Just the 

warmth of a kiss.” 

Menoyo, who learned of his friend’s 

death while being held at an immigration 

detention center in McAllen, Texas, says, 

“It was like I lost a part of me.” 

When Morgan’s lawyer called Loretta 

to break the news, she dropped the 

phone. Morgan’s daughter Anne, who 

was with her at the time, says, “I remember 

my grandmother falling down on the 

floor, screaming and crying. That is a 

memory I will never forget.” 

After Morgan was killed, Herbert 

Matthews sent Ernest Hemingway a letter. 

By then, Matthews, who once claimed 

that he had “invented” Castro, had seen 

his reputation collapse as his reporting on 

Cuba was exposed as gullible and partisan. 

In his letter, he told Hemingway, “There 

were even some pickets parading in front 

of the Times last Saturday bearing placards 

against me.” Matthews was rattled by 

Castro’s decision to execute Morgan. He 

reread the “very moving” statement that 

Morgan had sent him from the mountains, 

and told Hemingway, “Here was an 

obviously uneducated and very simple, 

tough guy who yet went to Cuba, as he 

says, to fight for the American principles 

of freedom and against Communism. He 

went on doing so for so long that he got 

himself executed.” Matthews said that he 

thought Morgan’s saga was “like an Ernest 

Hemingway story,” adding, “if anybody 

writes it, it should be you.” 

On March 12th, Rodríguez, still unaware 

that Morgan had been executed, 

got in a car with a friend to go to another 

safe house, in Camagüey. State-security 

vehicles suddenly surrounded them, and 

Rodríguez was taken to a prison processing 

center, in Havana, where a sergeant 

greeted her as the “widow of William 

Morgan.” With that, she knew. She 

lunged at the sergeant, pounding him 

with her fists, then ran out to the street, 

through the town, as the police gave 

chase; she kept running, not knowing 

where she was going. “I ran for an hour,” 

she says, before the police caught her. 

Rodríguez was taken to La Cabaña, 

and forced to walk by the wall where 

Morgan had been executed. Guards then 

took her to another prison, locking her in 

a cell that had a hole in the floor for a latrine. 

Lizards crawled over her at night. 

“The guards beat me with sticks,” she recalls. 

“Oh, God, did they beat me.” 

Amonth later, the newly inaugurated 

U.S. President, John F. Kennedy, 

launched the invasion of Cuba that had 

been approved by Eisenhower in 1960. 

Although America’s role was evident, 

Kennedy hoped to maintain deniability, 

and so the landing place was shifted from 

the town of Trinidad to the more remote 

Bay of Pigs—a location that would reduce 

the “noise level” but that was too far 

west to allow escape into the Escambray 

Mountains. At the last moment, Kennedy 

also cancelled a second wave of air 

strikes, fearing that they would betray direct 

U.S. involvement. 

Soon after the counter-revolutionary 

brigade landed on the beach, it was 

“My fellowgraduates, today we leave behind the trappings of youth, step 

boldly onto the road of life, and move back in with our parents.”

“Mate with you? I was just going to use you as a Qtip.’ ” 

bombarded. The commander sent out 

urgent messages over his shortwave radio 

to American officials: 

• • 

12:28 P.M.: Without jet air support cannot 

hold. Have no ammo left for tanks. 

1:25 P.M.: Need air support immediately. 

Red Beach wiped out. 

Late that evening, the commander 

said, “I have nothing left to fight 

with....Farewell, friends!” The line went 

dead. The brigade was obliterated: a hundred 

and fourteen members killed, and 

more than a thousand captured. A C.I.A. 

operative said that, for the rest of his life, 

he would have regrets about what happened, 

but added, “That is the echo of 

anybody who’s ever tried to do anything 

in history.” 

At the outset of the Bay of Pigs attack, 

Castro declared, for the first time, that 

Cuba was socialist. Philip Bonsal, the former 

Ambassador, later said of Castro, 

“He cannot endure any sharing of authority. 

. . . This drive for power is a far 

more constant element in his makeup 

than is the philosophy behind any particular 

revolutionary panacea he may be 

peddling. Castro has now attained his 

goal. Everything in Cuba hinges on him. 

He holds his job at his own pleasure.” 

Menoyo was released from the Texas 

detention center. After writing to Morgan’s 

mother that “William will be our 

eternal symbol until we will either win or 

perish,” he went to Florida and founded 

Alpha 66, a paramilitary organization 

aimed at overthrowing Castro. On December 

28, 1964, Menoyo and three 

members of the group boarded a boat in 

the Dominican Republic and landed at 

the southeastern end of Cuba. After 

twenty-eight days on the run in the 

mountains, Menoyo and his party were 

captured. When guards removed a blindfold 

that they had made Menoyo wear, he 

recalls, he was standing before Castro. “I 

knew you would come, but I also knew 

that I would catch you,” Castro said. 

Menoyo was thrown into prison, vanishing 

along with Rodríguez. 

THE LAST FIGHT 

One day not long ago, while researching 

Morgan’s story, I went to Miami 

to meet Rodríguez. An elegant woman in 

her mid-seventies, she had gray hair and 

stooped shoulders that made her seem 

shorter than her five feet two inches, but 

her face was still striking and she moved 

with steely purpose, as if beating back a 

strong wind. “I still have the spirit of a revolutionary,” 

she said. 

After her arrest, in 1961, she spent a 

decade in prison. She had been a plantada, 

meaning someone who was 

“rooted,” and had refused to take classes 

in Marxism-Leninism or to be “rehabilitated” 

by the state. To protest the treatment 

of prisoners, she went on several 

hunger strikes, her body becoming an 

X-ray of itself, and she was often locked, 

virtually naked, in solitary confinement, 

using newspapers to keep herself warm. 

She read, under the faint light, the Biblical 

story of Job. The incessant beatings 

by guards left one of her eyes impaired 

and her veins damaged. Her daughters 

were raised by her parents, in Cuba, and 

their teachers told them that their 

mother and father were traitors. “When 

you’re in jail, it’s your family that hurts 

the most,” she said. The girls suffered 

“great trauma.” 

One of her daughters once visited her 

in prison and screamed at her, “You 

abandoned us!” 

Recalling those years, Rodríguez says, 

“I no longer know how to cry, but I cry 

inside.” 

William’s mother, Loretta, had never 

met Rodríguez, but she campaigned for 

her release, petitioning members of 

Congress and drawing support from the 

clergy of the Catholic Church. In 1971, 

in response to mounting international 

pressure, Rodríguez was released early 

from prison. Though constantly followed 

by Cuba’s secret police, she tried 

to rebuild her family. Eight years later, 

she and her daughters, by then grown 

and married, arranged to fly to the 

United States, along with relatives. As 

the group boarded the plane, officials 

seized Rodríguez, forcing her to stay behind 

and pushing her to the edge of 

madness. 

She continued to try to get out. In 

1980, Castro began the Mariel boat lift, 

allowing many Cubans to leave for the 

U.S., among them criminals and mental 

patients. Rodríguez claimed that she was 

a prostitute, but was recognized by authorities 

and stopped. For a month, she 

slept in a tent by the harbor. Finally, in 

August, as the last of the boats were about 

to leave, an official told her, “You can go 

tonight.” Carrying only a toothbrush and 

a comb, she got on a creaky, thirty-foot 

boat crammed with passengers. 

As the boat left the harbor, she heard 

a loud crackling sound, like that of a firing 

squad. A Cuban Navy cutter was firing at 


them. Bullets splintered the hull, and, as 

the boat slowly began to sink, it seemed 

that Rodríguez’s life would end in a scene 

of cosmic cruelty. Then she heard another 

sound: a helicopter from the U.S. 

Coast Guard. Another boat was summoned, 

which rescued her and the other 

passengers. 

Upon reaching Florida—her mind 

filled with memories of travelling there 

with Morgan during the Trujillo conspiracy, 

two decades earlier—she bent down 

to the ground, overcome with emotion. 

Taken to an immigration holding room, 

she told an American official, “I am Olga, 

the widow of the Yankee comandante, 

William Alexander Morgan. I was a political 

prisoner.” 

Rodríguez was released, and she flew 

to Toledo. “I knew this is where I had to 

be,” she says. She immediately went to see 

Loretta. “She wrapped me in her arms, as 

if she were holding a part of William,” 

Rodríguez recalls. Loretta, who had never 

much approved of William’s previous relationships, 

told her, “I can see why my 

son loved you so.” 

If Rodríguez had lived with Morgan 

only in the present, she now seemed 

imprisoned in the past. At every turn, 

she was forced to remember, or recordar—a 

word that derives from the 

Latin recordor, which means “to pass 

back through the heart.” Rodríguez 

often says, “The past is the past, but it’s 

always present.” 

Rodríguez learned that, a few years 

after Morgan was executed, his father 

died from poor health, which some family 

members attributed to his grief. Morgan’s 

son, from his second marriage, had 

also died, from uncertain causes. His 

daughter Anne had been rebellious in her 

youth. “I know I got that from my father,” 

she says. Her grandmother always 

wrote her on the day that Morgan was 

executed, to keep “his memory alive inside 

me.” Anne eventually married three 

times—“I’m an adventurous lady”—and 

had two children. She has kept the final 

letter that Morgan sent her. “I still cry 

when I read it,” she recalls. “That’s my 

daddy.” 

Morgan, in his final letter to Rodríguez, 

had begged her not to “let your life 

become lifeless and sad. If you should 

find someone who you should love and 

who respects you, marry him; because 

knowing that you are happy, I will be 

also.” In 1985, Rodríguez married a 

welder in Toledo. “He is a very good 

man,” she told me. She paused, then 

added, “What I had with William was...” 

She struggled to find the words in English, 

then chose a Spanish phrase: “un 

gran amor.” A close friend of Rodríguez, 

Jon Richardson, told me, “She still loves 

William as if he’s just now coming up the 

mountain.” 

For more than two decades, Rodríguez, 

honoring a request from William’s 

mother, who died in 1988, has waged 

what she calls her “last fight”: to restore 

William’s U.S. citizenship and to retrieve 

his remains, so that he can be laid to rest 

in his family’s plot, in Toledo—and 

finally come in from the cold. “He did not 

deserve to die without a country,” Rodríguez 

says. 

The U.S. government has reinstated a 

person’s citizenship only in rare instances, 

such as that of General Robert E. Lee, 

and for years Rodríguez’s pleas were 

rebuffed. In 2005, she sent a letter to 

President George W. Bush, saying, 

“Please Mr. President, may God have you 

make the right decision. I beg of you.” 

Though she was nearly seventy, she 

threatened to go on a hunger strike outside 

the White House. “I’m ready,” she 

told the Miami Herald. “I can go a long 

time without eating. This time, it’s for 

William.” 

In 2007, she received a letter from the 

State Department, acknowledging that 

its original finding against Morgan could 

not be sustained. The letter stated, “Mr. 

Morgan shall be deemed never to have 

relinquished his U.S. nationality.” 

Still, Rodríguez told me, she could not 

rest until Morgan had been buried in 

America. In 2002, Marcy Kaptur, an 

Ohio congresswoman, visited Cuba and 

received assurances from Castro that 

Morgan’s remains could be retrieved 

from the Colón Cemetery, in Havana, 

where he had been buried along with 

Carreras. Since then, Rodríguez says, she 

has been stymied. In a bizarre twist, 

Cuban officials claim that they cannot 

find Morgan’s bones. “They are playing a 

trick on me,” Rodríguez says. 

She has received support for her crusade 

from the aging, dwindling members 

of Alpha 66—though Menoyo is 

now an outcast from the group. In 1986, 

after serving almost twenty-two years in 

prison, during which he was repeatedly 

tortured, Menoyo went into exile in 

Spain and renounced any efforts to use 

violence to overthrow Castro. “When 

you are subjected to a policy of savagery 

and barbarism, you come to the conclusion 

that you have to reject those methods, 

that you have to be the first to set 

hatred aside, otherwise it will destroy 

you,” he has said. 

To the shock of Rodríguez and 

many of his friends, Menoyo permanently 

returned to Cuba in 2003, seeking 

reconciliation and a peaceful transformation. 

“The day I lose my dreams,” 

he said, “I will be lost.” Although Rodríguez 

still speaks fondly of Menoyo, 

many of his fellow-rebels now dismiss 

him as a traitor. 

Menoyo recently suffered an aneurysm, 

and when I last spoke to him by 

phone his voice was faint, and he had 

only enough strength to talk for a few 

minutes. He had watched Castro cling 

to power until 2006, when he was 

eighty, only to hand the Presidency over 

to his brother Raúl, who was seventyfive. 

Menoyo told me that he still hoped 

to see “the end of this movie.” But he 

did not believe that the regime would 

ever turn over Morgan’s bones. “Just the 

other day, Fidel was going around and 

denouncing William, saying he worked 

for the C.I.A.,” Menoyo said. He explained 

that, for the regime to address 

Rodríguez’s request, it would have to 

confront the betrayal of the revolution. 

Rodríguez, however, has faith that she 

will prevail. When I met her in Miami, 

where she had travelled from Ohio to attend 

a meeting of Alpha 66, she said, “I 

can’t give up. If I have to, I will go to the 

cemetery and take the bones myself.” She 

lit a cigarette, her mottled fingers trembling. 

“William and I had so little time. 

We could never have the life we dreamed 

of.” For a moment, she closed her eyes, as 

if holding back tears. Then she said, “If I 

can do this for him, then we can both 

finally have peace, and be free.” apple

THE YANKEE COMANDANTE

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